(MENAFN- Gulf Times) Opposition leader Ed Miliband yesterday accused Prime Minister David Cameron of being "dodgy" after media reports named seven Conservative Party donors who held HSBC accounts in Switzerland.

Miliband chastised Cameron for appointing the London-based bank's former chief executive and chairman Stephen Green as a trade minister in a fierce exchange over the HSBC leaked files scandal during a debate session in parliament.

"Does the prime minister expect us to believe that in the three years Stephen Green was a minister, he never had a conversation with him about what was going on at HSBC?" Miliband said.

"Can the prime minister explain the revolving door between Tory party HQ and the Swiss branch of HSBC?" Miliband asked, accusing him of being "a dodgy prime minister surrounded by dodgy donors".

The cache of files made public in the so-called SwissLeaks case includes the names of celebrities, alleged arms dealers and politicians - though inclusion on the list does not necessarily imply wrongdoing.

Published at the weekend, the files claim HSBC's Swiss division helped clients in more than 200 countries evade taxes on accounts containing $119bn.

A report in the Guardian newspaper named seven Conservative donors as being account holders and said they had given the party a total of more than £5mn.
Cameron stressed that the Labour party was in power at the time the HSBC scandal first surfaced in 2007 and said they too had worked closely with Green.

"No government has been tougher than this one in chasing down tax evasion and tax avoidance," he said.

Several countries though not Britain have launched investigations into HSBC in recent years following the revelations.

Tax officials say there has only been one prosecution resulting from the thousands of UK account holders listed.

Meanwhile, ministers were under increasing pressure yesterday to explain why they did not take earlier action against massive tax evasion involving HSBC's banking in Switzerland.

A document unearthed by the Evening Standard shows that ministers were aware in 2010 that large numbers of customers were hiding money from the UK tax authorities in accounts at the HSBC branch in Geneva.

Dated November 2011, it announced the creation of a specialist HMRC unit to probe offshore tax evasion relating to "HSBC Geneva account holders".

Treasury Minister David Gauke was quoted in the announcement, which did not single out any other banks, saying: "The days when untaxed income or capital could be safely salted away offshore, beyond the reach of the taxman, have gone."

The new disclosure came as the chief official at HM Revenue & Customs faced a grilling from MPs yesterday about why there were not more prosecutions of tax-dodgers using HSBC.

Asked about what he knew in 2011, Gauke told the Standard that he did not know the bank itself was guilty of wrongdoing, only that clients were evading tax.