Everyone’s unfairly guilty, until proven innocent in the eyes of financial regulators

The recent raids by French prosecutors that targeted the Paris offices of five major banks including HSBC and BNP Paribas on suspicion of fiscal fraud is a serious matter, and it’s one that should not be taken lightly.

If the authorities have evidence that a bank or its employees have committed a crime, then they should absolutely investigate and hold those responsible accountable. But these investigations must be conducted with care and on a clear legal basis.

There’s also the issue of privacy to consider. When authorities search a bank’s offices, they have access to a lot of sensitive financial and personal information, not just about the bank but also about its customers. Ultimately, banks and financial regulators ought to be limited to opening only specific banks accounts – those pinned by strong evidence of suspicious activity.

Unfortunately, the searches in Paris tore apart hundreds of thousands of innocent accounts in the process. This is an alarming example of how little protection there is for personal information.

Authorities must not be investigating people for the sake of it. That’s carte blanche, you cannot go into a bank account and then demand to rip it to shreds because you assume some people out of the 10 million have been behaving illegally.