BACK in 2012, HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, paid $1.9 billion to the United States’ Department of Justice to avoid prosecution for allowing its global subsidiaries to move at least $881 million in proceeds from Columbian and Mexican cartels. A report from a 2012, US Senate-led committee detailed that HSBC had “transported billions of dollars of cash in armoured vehicles, cleared suspicious travellers’ cheques worth billions, and allowed Mexican drug lords to buy planes with money laundered through Cayman Islands accounts.”

But HSBC’s willingness to turn a blind eye to its customers’ criminal activities extends far beyond Mexico and the drugs market. Bad as this seems — and, make no mistake, the notorious Sinaloa Cartel built by “El Chapo” Guzman, which dominated the world’s narcotics market used a ruthlessness and brutality previously unimaginable, developing people trafficking and kidnap as buoyant sidelines — there were other beneficiaries of the bank’s iniquitous approach.

Indeed the blood-smeared, white-gloved hand of the “Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation” was simultaneously reaching out to regimes in the Middle East.