HSBC denies plans to move its tax function offshore

Britain’s biggest bank has indicated that it may keep its headquarters in the UK for the sake of customer credibility, after a senior official said a number of low tax jurisdictions had approached the group.

Chris Spooner, the group’s head of financial planning and tax, told a London conference that there had been “nothing tempting yet”, but the group had moved its headquarters before and was “not scared to do so again,” Accountancy Age reported last Thursday.

“The UK used to be a good place to be for purely tax reasons. I am not sure if that is the case any more,” he added. But the Reuters news agency reported on Friday that an HSBC spokesman said: “It is not true that we might be leaving Britain for tax reasons.”

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