Hong Kong HSBC relatively unscathed as bank struggles with catalogue of errors

"Our executive directors have a combined 178 years of service - a track record almost without parallel in the industry. I believe there is no better management team in banking and it is no coincidence that HSBC has remained profitable throughout the financial crisis."

So said Stephen Green in HSBC's 2009 annual report, his last as executive chairman before he was made a peer and joined the government as trade minister. His boast was designed to make colleagues' controversial pay packages easier for shareholders to swallow - investment banking chief Stuart Gulliver had been awarded a £9 million (HK$108 million) bonus.

In 2009, the claim that HSBC was a cut above other big banks was credible. It had not been rescued by taxpayers and was able easily to tap its shareholders for £12.5 billion (HK$149.7 billion) of fresh capital. It also seemed free of scandals.

Competitors had "profoundly damaged the industry's reputation", he declared. HSBC was "strong, steadfast, sustainable"- the words emblazoned on the cover of that year's annual report.

In the event, 22 per cent of shareholders refused to back the pay report - a considerable protest. But Green's claim that he was leading the best-managed major bank in the world would soon sound ridiculous.

"HSBC has made mistakes in the past, and for them I am very sorry," his successor Douglas Flint, the former long-serving finance director, told shareholders in July, 2012. "Candidly, in particular areas we fell short of the standards that I, my colleagues, our regulators, customers, and investors expect."

A grovel was the only position Flint could adopt. US officials had uncovered money-laundering and sanctions-busting at HSBC on a colossal scale. The bank's culture was "pervasively polluted", said a senior US Department of Justice official. The confessions have kept coming, including this week's acknowledgement of past control and compliance failures at a Swiss private bank.