An article in the Middle East Eye on 8 April draws a link between Rethink Rebuild Society's bank campaign and recent revelations of the Panama papers. Rethink Rebuild Society initiated a campaign in 2014 to expose discriminatory practices of banks against Syrian individuals and organisations. HSBC was one of the main targets of this campaign. On the other hand, the recently leaked Panama papers have revealed that HSBC lobbied to maintain the Swiss bank accounts of Rami Makhlouf, who is the first cousin of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the icon of corruption in Syrian (with estimates that he owns approximately sixty percent of the Syrian economy). It is deeply disconcerting to learn that a bank which has systematically closed accounts of Syrian nationals under the pretence of risk analysis lobbied to maintain the accounts of a figurehead of corruption.
