Stephen Green, Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint

Stephen Keith Green, Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint (born 7 November 1948), is a British politician, former Conservative Minister of State for Trade and Investment, former group chairman of HSBC Holdings plc, and Anglican priest.

Stephen Green was born on 7 November 1948 to Dudley Keith Green and Dorothy Rosamund Mary Green (née Wickham).

After a private education at Lancing College, near his family home in Brighton, he attended Exeter College, Oxford, obtaining a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in 1966.

Green's parents were active churchgoers and influenced his religious activities both as a young man and later in life; after graduating he spent a year volunteering in the East End of London at a hostel for recovering alcoholics, a move also reputedly influenced by a visit from a Church of England vicar.

It was during his time at the hostel that he met Janian Joy, a fellow volunteer, whom he married in 1971.

In 1971, Green began his professional life as a civil servant in the British government's Ministry of Overseas Development (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), where he spent the next six years.

In 1975 (during a Harkness Fellowship, on secondment from the Overseas Development Administration) Green also obtained a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 1977, he joined McKinsey & Co Inc. management consultants, with whom he undertook assignments in Europe, North America and the Middle East.

As a result of being headhunted, Green joined the then Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in 1982, initially on a two-year contract, with responsibility for corporate planning activities.

In 1985 he was put in charge of the development of the bank's global treasury operations, and in 1992 became group treasurer of HSBC Holdings plc with responsibility for the HSBC Group's treasury and capital markets businesses globally.

In March 1998 Green was appointed to the board of HSBC Holdings plc as executive director of Investment Banking and Markets, responsible for the investment banking, private banking and asset management activities of the Group.

As executive director, Green cancelled all executive bonuses in both 2001 and 2002, telling The Wall Street Journal in March 2003: "We took the view that a business that had not performed for the shareholder couldn't expect to receive bonuses".

The decision saw some key staff leave in protest but it also won the company some praise; Institutional Investor magazine quoted HSBC's then chairman, Sir John Bond, as saying: "We had corporate clients come up to us and say, 'Thank God you've taken a stand'".

In the year before becoming chief executive, Green earned below £1m; HSBC's annual report for the period showed that none of the company's five top-earning employees was a board member.

He assumed additional responsibility for the group's corporate banking business in May 2002.

Green told The Guardian in October 2003: "Plenty of people in this organisation earn more than me. I genuinely don't care. I can hardly be described as lowly paid. Since when was money the be-all and end-all?"

Asked by the newspaper's reporter Jill Treanor how he reconciled the organization's high salaries and bonuses with his religious faith, he replied: "Do I personally feel some kind of incompatibility between what I believe and being in financial services markets? I can only say no".

His appointment as group chief executive took effect on 1 June 2003.

Shortly afterwards, in October 2003, HSBC announced that it would offshore the work done by its UK finance processing centres in Birmingham, Sheffield, Brentwood and Swansea to India, Malaysia and China within two years.

The move, which represented the largest such offshoring in the financial services sector at that time and would lead to the loss of 4,000 British jobs, led the UK trade union UNIFI to warn Green that the "gloves were off".

He defended the decision, telling The Guardian's Jill Treanor: "'If you are a responsible company like us we do need to think about this on a global basis. We have to approach this in a responsible and human way. I also have to bear in mind that people are going to get jobs in India (and elsewhere). It's wrong to pretend you can protect the existing jobs and wrong to pretend there isn't going to be change. It can't be the right response to say that emerging markets have no right to jobs.' He added: 'Cost minimisation cannot be the only driver of this. There is no way we want to jeopardise the quality of customer service'."

Green also oversaw HSBC's acquisition of Household International, a US subprime lender, as well as its integration into the parent company.

He later came to regret the deal, which was the largest acquisition in a series conducted by HSBC in the five years leading up to his appointment as its chief executive.

Green's successor as the top of HSBC, Stuart Gulliver, said "between 2004 and 2010, our anti-money laundering controls should have been stronger and more effective and we failed to spot and deal with unacceptable behaviour."

In January 2005, Green became chairman of HSBC Bank plc, the group's UK clearing bank subsidiary, and group executive chairman in June 2006.

In its July 2005 issue, Bloomberg Markets magazine reported that HSBC was allowing money laundering by drug dealers and state sponsors of terrorism; the magazine alleged that this had included a transfer of $100,000 in April 2000 to the Taliban in Afghanistan which had subsequently resulted in a fine levied by the US Treasury Department.

Green denied the allegations, calling them "a singular and wholly irresponsible attack on the bank's international compliance procedures".

Subsequent investigations however, confirmed that money laundering had taken place at HSBC for several years throughout Green's tenure as chief executive and chairman, chiefly for the Sinaloa Cartel.

Green earned well over £25 million per year at the time.

In September 2010, it was announced that Green would join the UK's Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government in early 2011 as an unpaid Minister of State for Trade and Investment.

In order to take up his ministerial position, he stepped down as group chairman of HSBC on 3 December 2010 and was replaced by Douglas Flint.

To enable him to be accountable to Parliament, he was created a life peer on 16 November 2010 as Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint, of Hurstpierpoint in the County of West Sussex, and was introduced in the House of Lords on 22 November.

He was Minister of State for Trade and Investment in both the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 11 January 2011 until 11 December 2013.

After Green's retirement from HSBC, the questions that had begun to be asked about the bank's behaviour under his leadership continued.

On 23 July 2012, the US Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 335-page report setting out HSBC's compliance failures over a ten-year period.

In the report, Senate investigators said the bank had bypassed the USA's sanctions against Iran, enabled money laundering by Mexican drug lords (chiefly for the Sinaloa Cartel), and had conducted business with companies with links to terrorism.

The report quoted emails copied to Green detailing such dubious transactions and alleged that the bank had continued to allow them to continue even after he and his colleagues had promised to act.

Green told Sky News that he had "no case to answer" over the money laundering scandal, saying: "As and when issues were drawn to our attention, as we were seeking to grapple with the issues, we took action. I think we must acknowledge there were some failures of implementation. HSBC has expressed its regret for that. I share that regret."

Defending Green, Lord Oakeshott, a former Treasury spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said: "Stephen Green was a thoughtful banker in holy orders. But if even he couldn't stop these scandals, banks like HSBC and Barclays aren't just too big to fail, they are clearly too big to control".

The Senate report prompted shadow financial secretary to the Treasury, Chris Leslie, to write to Green asking him to "place on the record – at the earliest opportunity – an assurance that you took every appropriate step if and when you became aware of the issues raised by this report" and asking a number of specific questions.