The soon-to-retire banker looks back on his six-year reign at the helm of a bank some deride (to ridicule, laugh at with contempt) as ‘too big to manage,too big to fail and too big to jail’Douglas Flint has faced a number of calls for his resignation during his six years as chairman of HSBC. At last week’s annual shareholders’ assembly – his last – he was even asked whether he should be spending his retirement in jail. But the 61-year-old-fashioned, who has been on the board of the bank for 22 years, or reckons he has faced far more difficult moments than a few question marks over whether he was doing a decent job. The worst,he says, was not the financial crisis of 2008, or when he was the bank’s finance chief,but the record-breaking £1.2bn fine slapped on the bank for facilitating money laundering in 2012 and the deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with the US department of justice that accompanied it. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com