Breach of BBC independence

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Rona Fairhead is Chair of the BBC Trust responsible for ensuring their independence. This blog shows that she herself has breached that independence. This is no real surprise as she was head of the risk committee at HSBC US at the time the bank was caught laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and terrorists.

I have received a response from the BBC Trust to my “complaint”, although I had never actually made a formal complaint I had simply written to the Director General and asked him this:

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This is the most relevant section of the BBC Trust reply (full letter is below) :

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In his request for an interview Erik Sandberg had included a link to an interview with me about HSBC and Rona Fairhead. The BBC are saying because that was in the public domain that it was acceptable for them to forward an interview request to HSBC. This makes no sense at all. The request from Erik was for an interview with Fairhead about the serious allegations made in my interview.

By this logic, if someone had written to the BBC requesting an interview concerning allegations contained in another interview about the  paedophile activities of Jimmy Savile, they would forward the request to Savile.

I consider it fairly conclusive proof that the BBC can no longer claim to be independent. The person in charge of ensuring their independence is an HSBC director; if requests to interview her are sent to HSBC then that is a conflict of interest. The breach of the Data Protection Act seems a minor matter in comparison.

The full letter:

Mr Wilson 160216[1]_1Mr Wilson 160216[1]_2Mr Wilson 160216[1]_3

The below section of the letter is complete nonsense. If the director of HSBC who happens to be the Chair of the BBC Trust has no influence on editorial decisions, besides being an ex-colleague of Director of News, James Harding; besides having been “recruited” by the Director General’s wife’s firm of headhunters, Saxton Bampfylde, then the BBC can surely report a £1bn fraud by HSBC which has been covered up by the FCA, who have been severely criticised for doing so by the Complaints Commissioner (reported in the Times, Financial Times and Guardian),  and which has been the subject of 2 parliamentary hearings by the Treasury Select Committee -(here and here). And it is not as though the BBC don’t know about the fraud.

Screen Shot 2016-02-16 at 16.33.26As an example of BBC censorship of HSBC news, see this Google search concerning HSBC being sued by Mexican families of drug cartel murders which has been reported around the world, but not by the BBC –

hsbc sued mexican - Google Search