Foreign news: Hang Seng's China sell off, HM Treasury offloads more Lloyds, hackers taste big bucks

Banking Day staff
  • HSBC's majority owned subsidiary, Hang Seng Bank, will sell a 4.99 per cent stake in China's Industrial Bank for US$2.7 billion to shore up its capital position and fund expansion. An announcement by Hang Seng stated it expected to book a US$1 billion profit from selling discounted shares to institutional investors. This is the second such sell-down by Hang Seng, leaving it holding just 0.88 per cent of the Chinese bank's issued shares on completion of this deal. HSBC owns 62 per cent of Hang Seng Bank, which runs a commercial and retail banking business in Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau and Singapore.

  • The New York Times reports that Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and the Royal Bank of Scotland will collectively pay several billion dollars and plead guilty to criminal antitrust violations for rigging the price of foreign currencies, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Most, if not all, of the pleas are expected to come from the banks' holding companies, sources told the NYT. This is a first for Wall Street giants that until now have had only subsidiaries or their biggest banking units plead guilty. The foreign exchange investigation, which centres on accusations that traders colluded to fix the price of major currencies, will test the Justice Department's strategy for securing guilty pleas on Wall Street.

  • Britain's Treasury has announced it has sold a two per cent stake in Lloyds Banking Group shares for £500 million. The sale brings the UK Treasury's holdings to 19.93 per cent, after the government invested £20 billion in Lloyds at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, giving the UK's taxpayers a 39 per cent share of what was a deeply troubled banking group. The Treasury that it had been trying to sell down its holding ever since.

  • Credit card hackers in the US looking for new ways to drain money from consumers' bank accounts and evade increased bank security measures have discovered a clever side door - mobile payment apps and gift cards such as those offered by Starbucks, or mass transit cards. CNBC reports that criminals are hijacking consumers' coffee card accounts, moving the stored value to cards they control, and then using the auto-reload function to repeatedly trickle funds out of any linked debit and credit cards accounts as small transactions are likely to escape detection by anti-fraud software.