My Take | Banks are doing BN(O)ers in UK a favour by withholding their MPF pensions
- Anti-China MPs in Britain have claimed human rights violations by banks such as HSBC for making MPF withdrawals difficult while their own government has seized US$2 billion worth of gold from the people of Venezuela
Given its colonial history and self-inflicted mishaps in recent decades, it’s hard to feel sorry for HSBC. Long gone are the days when Hong Kong investors said, “it’s never wrong to hold their stock even if you have paid too much for them”.
However, the latest human rights criticism of the bank, and to a lesser extent Standard Chartered, by a group of British MPs rather takes the cake when it comes to politicians pumping out opportunistic hot air. But for the United States government, it may well be regarded as the gold standard of Anglo-American hypocrisy. Some of the claims made in the report are highly exaggerated; others are half-truths or out of the local context.
On those MPs’ telling, the British banks have committed human rights abuses in Hong Kong, first, by expressing support for the national security law, even though it is the law of the land in which they operate and, second, by HSBC declining pension withdrawal requests of BN(O)ers under Hong Kong’s Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) as they and their families resettle in Britain. It would be hard to read a more nonsensical report.
Let’s just say for all the fire and brimstone in the British report, those BN(O)ers will eventually get their money back, if not now – because many left in a hurry – then later.
As a practical matter, we are also talking about very meagre amounts that most of those accounts are likely to hold. When you are in your 20s and 30s, the age groups of many BN(O)ers, how much do you think they have in those accounts?
The whole purpose of those MPs, who call themselves “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong”, is to use any excuse to manufacture another Chinese human rights violation story. But even if those claims were true, they pale in comparison to the highway robbery being committed by their own government in seizing roughly US$2 billion worth of gold, held in the Bank of England, that belongs to the people of Venezuela. If those MPs fret so much about human rights, maybe they should take up the Venezuelan cause, now that the UK has quietly dumped Juan Guaido as the country’s “legitimate” leader.