Household HSBC Watch

By Michael Casey, ASSOCIATED PRESS, 8:19 a.m. June 27, 2005 - CALANG, Indonesia –
Mike Gray spends most days as Rolls-Royce’s regional director selling jet engines to the Indonesian military or compression systems to oil companies across the country’s vast archipelago. But since the tsunami, the 54-year-old Briton with a boyish face has assumed a new role: spurring corporate relief efforts. He then approached the London-based bank HSBC Holdings with a proposal to build a $500,000 clinic in the coastal town of Calang. “When he said half a million dollars, I almost gasped,” said Richard McHowat, the bank’s chief in Indonesia. “I said, ‘Mike, we’re going to struggle to put that kind of money together.’” The state-of-the-art primary care clinic was completed nine weeks later.

“What this article fails to tell the reader is that HSBC continued to charge relatives £25 per transaction to wire money out to affected relatives until a memo went out to branch staff on January 14th to stop the practice following a customer complaint” said a member of Household - HSBC Watch. “Our source is a reliable insider. Besides, the predatory lending arm of former Household International, now called HSBC Finance Corporation, continued to charge questionable late fees and high interest” said the group.