Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Lord Green can’t get out of this HSBC grilling ... The former trade minister will face questions from MPs on subjects he has so far been reluctant to address

Stephen Green, former chairman of HSBC, faces a grilling on Tuesday. Stephen Green, former chairman of HSBC, faces a grilling on money laundering and tax evasion at the bank. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

They seek him here, they seek him there … the former HSBC gaffer, Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, might be described as the scarlet pimpernel of banking. Since the furore over the leaked HSBC files earlier this year, Green has successfully eluded any serious questioning. His successors as chief executive and chairman, Stuart Gulliver and Douglas Flint, were left to apologise in his place.

But the long arm of the Lords will be feeling Green’s ermine-lined collar on Tuesday, when Labour peer Clive Hollick, chair of the upper house’s economic affairs committee, has invited him to have his say at a genteel-sounding session on “banking culture”.

No one expects the kind of dressing-down meted out by the MP Margaret Hodge to Green’s former colleagues, but Hollick has promised to bring up the money laundering in Mexico and the tax dodging in Switzerland. After all, Green was at the helm during much of the misbehaviour that plunged the bank into a political and legal crisis, before sailing over to the House of Lords in 2010 to become David Cameron’s first trade minister.

His mantra has been that, “as a matter of principle”, he “will not comment on the business of HSBC, past or present”. HSBC has confirmed that its former boss was not bound by any confidentiality clause. Perhaps Green, an ordained lay minister in the Church of England, will now see fit to set this particular principle aside.