The chief executive of Bloomberg HSBC Holding Plc, Noel Quinn and other senior managers, were accused in a London lawsuit of pressuring the bank's staff to loan millions of pounds to a friend's real estate firm, where Quinn's daughter worked.
After Quinn and a senior manager intervened, HSBC gave Mar City Plc a 40 million $49.3 million credit facility and handed over a 10 million personal loan to the company that had faced a crunch in late 2014, lawyers for Tony and Maggie Ryan said in court filings.
The Ryans are trying to take control of the company and drive it into insolvency because of the loans, according to documents prepared for a High Court hearing this week. Quinn is accused of inducing his long standing friends to take the loan.
HSBC denies all of the allegations. The bank's lawyers said that the accusations by the couple are selective, inaccurate and incomplete. The evidence is too numerous for HSBC to address each and every one of the inaccuracies in their evidence. The lawyers of the lender said that the Ryans don't have any explanation on how the company could have been saved or how HSBC prioritized its own interest over Mar City s. Bridget Lucas, HSBC's lawyer, said they offer no explanations as to which the assets of MCPLC were supposedly stripped.
Quinn, who was head of Asia Pacific commercial banking at the time, denies telling Ryan that the loan management unit at the bank was like the wild west, the lender said in their court filing. A spokesman for HSBC wouldn't say anything further.
The homebuilder ended up with financial difficulties and entered administration in 2016.
It is the second attempt to win the claim that was shot down by a London judge earlier in the day. The Ryans won a rehearing after an appeals court said a previous judge should have withdrawn from overseeing the case because a loan from HSBC to a hot yoga studio owned by Judge Nigel Gerald and his wife raised the perception of possible bias. There was no finding of actual prejudice.
The judgment found that the Ryans lost a ruling in June 2022 when Gerald viewed their allegations as having no evidence and an attempt to blacken the name of HSBC.
The ruling said that HSBC tried to help Mar City restructure.
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