[2] In 1975 (during a Harkness Fellowship, on secondment from the Overseas Development Administration) Green also obtained a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
[2] The decision saw some key staff leave in protest but it also won the company some praise; Institutional Investor magazine quoted HSBC's then chairman, Sir John Bond, as saying: "We had corporate clients come up to us and say, 'Thank God you've taken a stand'".
[6] In the year before becoming chief executive, Green earned below £1m; HSBC's annual report for the period showed that none of the company's five top-earning employees was a board member.
Asked by the newspaper's reporter Jill Treanor how he reconciled the organization's high salaries and bonuses with his religious faith, he replied: "Do I personally feel some kind of incompatibility between what I believe and being in financial services markets?
Shortly afterwards, in October 2003, HSBC announced that it would offshore the work done by its UK finance processing centres in Birmingham, Sheffield, Brentwood and Swansea to India, Malaysia and China within two years.
The move, which represented the largest such offshoring in the financial services sector at that time and would lead to the loss of 4,000 British jobs, led the UK trade union UNIFI to warn Green that the "gloves were off".
[9] Subsequent investigations however, confirmed that money laundering had taken place at HSBC[10] for several years throughout Green's tenure as chief executive and chairman,[11][12] chiefly for the Sinaloa Cartel.
[citation needed] Green's successor as the top of HSBC, Stuart Gulliver, said "between 2004 and 2010, our anti-money laundering controls should have been stronger and more effective and we failed to spot and deal with unacceptable behaviour.
"[14] In September 2010, it was announced that Green would join the UK's Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government in early 2011 as an unpaid Minister of State for Trade and Investment.
He was Minister of State for Trade and Investment in both the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 11 January 2011 until 11 December 2013.
On 23 July 2012, the US Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 335-page report setting out HSBC's compliance failures over a ten-year period.
In the report, Senate investigators said the bank had bypassed the USA's sanctions against Iran, enabled money laundering by Mexican drug lords (chiefly for the Sinaloa Cartel),[13] and had conducted business with companies with links to terrorism.
Chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge MP, said: "Either he didn't know and he was asleep at the wheel, or he did know and he was therefore involved in dodgy tax practices.
[22] A few days after the Panorama broadcast, Green resigned as chairman of the advisory council for banking industry body, The City UK,[24] saying that he did not want to damage the effectiveness of the organisation in promoting good governance and doing the right thing.
[27] Green is an ordained priest in the Church of England,[28] having studied theology at Manchester University's Northern Ordination course while in Hong Kong,[29] and he is the author of the book Serving God?
He has a sister, Elizabeth, who lives in the US and a brother, George Francis Green, who is professor of Labour Economics and Skills Development at the Institute of Education, University of London.