HSBC bets big on China as pressure mounts in London

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CEO sticks to a conciliatory, technocratic approach towards China and shrugs off warnings from British MPs

Picture: REUTERS/BRENDAN McDERMIDWhere were his ethics? asked members of the UK parliament. His morals? His stand against totalitarianism? Comparisons with 1930s Germany often seem “mad”, one politician allowed, but is any country “so evil and wicked” that Quinn would pull his business?

It played terribly in HSBC’s hometown of London. And yet, Quinn delighted another constituency: the Chinese Communist Party. The state-run Global Times praised Quinn as standing up against smears from the Western politicians, “a bunch of arrogant laymen”. For HSBC, a decision to leave China would be like the CEO of Bank of America deciding his company would decamp from the US Quinn said as much to the exasperated MPs in the hearing. They asked whether he had consider pulling up stakes because of human-rights abuses in China. “If the question was whether I am willing to walk away from Hong Kong, the answer is no,” he said. “We are too committed as an institution.

Yet Quinn was often overlooked and sidelined. In the fall of 2015 a memo announced he was being replaced as the head of the Asia-Pacific Commercial Bank, without mentioning what he would do next. Some insiders thought — wrongly, it turned out — that he was on the way out. Two years later, when Quinn was worldwide head of commercial banking, the board did not even consider him when the CEO’s job opened up, according to a person familiar with the search.

Other CEOs might chafe at being a fallback or the subject of that kind of chatter. Quinn, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has thick skin and lacks ego, according to friends and colleagues. At a recent online appearance, he brushed aside the significance of a June meeting with Prince Charles at the G7 meeting of world leaders in Cornwall. “We were the warm-up act,” he said.Quinn is taking much of HSBC down a peg, too.

In an interview in September with Bloomberg Television, Quinn staked out a different position from many Wall Street CEOs on whether employees will ever return to the office as before. He said no. Quinn is chasing the newly wealthy just as China President Xi Jinping says the country must crack down on inequality. Quinn sees no conflict. “Everyone’s interested in China as an opportunity for wealth,” he told Bloomberg Television. “And don’t just think about wealth in China as the super-rich, it’s also wealth for everybody.”

 

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