HSBC provided a conduit for "drug kingpins and rogue nations", according to a US Senate committee investigating money laundering claims at the bank.

Its report said suspicious funds from countries including Mexico, Iran and Syria (note: Mexico, Iran and Syria are 'rogue nations', the US, of course, is not...) had passed through the bank.

The committee is hearing from HSBC officials, one of whom said he found it "painful and embarrassing" to talk about the bank's shortcomings.

HSBC's head of group compliance, David Bagley, stepped down at the hearing.

Mr Bagley told the committee that the bank had "fallen short of our own and regulators' expectations but that a major overhaul of the bank's compliance activities was underway and that HSBC had "learned a lot of valuable lessons".

According to the Senate committee, HSBC accepted more than $15bn in cash from subsidiaries in Mexico, Russia and other countries at high risk of money laundering but failed to conduct any monitoring of these bulk cash transactions between mid-2006 and mid-2009.

Furthermore, the report found that HSBC knew of lax anti-money laundering practices at its Mexican subsidiary HBMX, which had dated back to its purchase in 2002.

...the United Nations tries to monitor the international drug trade, and their estimates are on the order of $400 to $500 billion -- half a trillion dollars a year -- in trade alone, which makes it higher than oil, something like 10 percent of the world trade. Where this money comes and goes to is mostly unknown, but general estimates are that maybe 60 percent of it passes through US banks. After that, a lot goes to offshore tax havens. It's so obscure that nobody monitors it, and nobody wants to.

...an estimated $13.7 trillion (SFr13 trillion), Swiss financial journalist Myret Zaki asks in her new book, Banking Secrecy is Dead, Long Live Tax Evasion (Le secret bancaire est mort, vive l’évasion fiscale), who is really benefitting most from tax evasion.

Her conclusion: British jurisdictions, where trusts are thriving. These secretive organisations are, in Zaki’s words, the "princely tools" of tax avoidance.

The non-governmental organisation Tax Justice Network valued the tax evasion market at $11.5 trillion in 2005, and at its current worth it comes in just under the United States’ Gross Domestic Product.

Activity in the Swiss financial centre is marginal by comparison. In 2008 it managed around SFr2.2 trillion in cross-border private assets, around half of which would have been undeclared.

Zaki argues that Switzerland should resist moralistic anti-banking secrecy arguments put forward by neighbouring countries and demand equal treatment. It should not give up too much, too quickly in the face of international pressure, she says.

swissinfo.ch: In your book you ask people to view recent events in terms of economic warfare ...

Myret Zaki: Take the United States. The Obama administration and Democrats like Senator Levin noted that there have been notable abuses, for example in the Cayman Islands and other Caribbean islands, but they only focused on Switzerland. No American bank has been as beleaguered as UBS, of which they wanted to make an example.

When Americans act, they only do so in relation to the financial industries of other countries and they do not target, for example, bankers in Florida who are sheltering a great deal of money, particularly Mexican. UBS only managed about one per cent of American tax evasion [funds]. But what’s been done about the remaining 99 per cent? Nothing.