Switzerland would far prefer to be noted for its Swiss cheese and chocolates than as the preferred place to undertake illicit banking. Yet, decades of practice suggest that it is the “go-to” place for wealthy individuals and corporations to engage in tax evasion, and hide stolen funds.

In 2012, Starbucks had sales of £400 million in the UK, but paid no corporation tax. It transferred some money to a Dutch sister company in royalty payments, bought coffee beans from a wholesale trading subsidiary in Switzerland, and paid high interest rates to borrow from other parts of the business, and as such avoided paying tax.

In the 1990s, Swiss banks willingly accepted money from the Sani Abacha family. Abacha was the head of state of Nigeria from 17 November 1993, when a military coup brought him to power, until his death on 8 June 1998. His regime was riddled with systematic corruption and misappropriation of public funds, as well as serious human rights violations, including arbitrary executions. Since May 1999, Nigeria has sought to recover billions of dollars which the Abacha stifled out of the country, stealing public funds and “protecting” them from the Nigerian people in Swiss and other bank accounts.

Most recently, earlier this month (8 February 2015) the Guardian, BBC and other outlets reported that HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers (Hollywood stars, royalty, clothing merchants, heirs to some of Europe’s biggest fortunes, relatives of dictators, people implicated in corruption scandals, arms industry figures and others) dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, handing out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities. HSBC’s Swiss bankers helped Emmanuel Shallop in this way. Shallop was subsequently convicted of dealing in “blood diamonds”, which has fuelled conflict across the African continent.

The revelations were based on leaked files covering the period 2005-2007. The current British Trade Minister Lord Stephen Green, then headed HSBC as the global bank’s Chief Executive, and later as the Group Chairman until 2010, when he left to join UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s new government.

Dave Hartnett, head of Britain’s regulatory authority HM Revenue and Customs, flew to Switzerland in May 2010 to start negotiating a deal under which there would be no prosecution of Swiss tax dodgers or their bankers.

Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK estimates that tax avoidance amounts to more than £25 billion a year, evasion to £70 billion, and outstanding debts to the tax service to £28 billion: a total of more than £120 billion. That’s roughly three-quarters of the British budget deficit. It’s equivalent to 80% of the UK’s revenue from income tax.

Yet, rather than pursue such evasion, the British press and current government scapegoat vulnerable individuals in receipt of welfare benefits as not working to pull the country out of a lengthy financial recession. All those on benefits (the unemployed, disabled, unlucky, and ill) are criminalised – and metro posters scream that benefit fraudsters will be punished. Benefit fraud amounts to approximately only £1.1 billion a year.

The budget deficit is used to justify austerity measures that disproportionately impact the most vulnerable. The current government has imposed changes that have led to significant cuts to public services, including in social housing, schools, hospitals, women’s services, and legal aid. The British media stands by and repeats the mantra that such cuts to public services are necessary, that those engage in social benefit fraud must be persecuted, and that there is no alternative.

This week, on 17 February 2015, Peter Oborne, political commentator for the conservative leaning British newspaper, the Telegraph, resigned from his post. He could no longer stand by the Telegraph omitting to cover significant stories pertaining to HSBC, the latest HSBC scandal being the latest example of the Telegraph engaging in a “fraud on its readers” by failing to shed light on the scandal. The Telegraph chose not to cover the story, burying it on the bottom of page two of the newspaper before granting the story a brief appearance on their website – before disappearing the story altogether.

HSBC spends more than £1 million on its advertising with the Telegraph and has withdrawn advertising from the newspaper in the past. The Telegraph has since been keenly astute not to offend HSBC, as it has become the one advertiser the paper “literally cannot afford to offend” (see Peter Oborne in Open Democracy).

In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Herman and Chomsky explained how propaganda and systemic biases function in mass media. Their Propaganda Model contended that private media operate as businesses interested in the sale of a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers) rather than that of quality news to the public. The theory contends that the way in which news is structured (through advertising, concentration of media ownerships, for example) creates an inherent conflict of interest which acts as propaganda for undemocratic corporate interests.

As the Telegraph’s handling of the HSBC tax evasion scandal shows, the propaganda model remains relevant today. As Peter Oborne himself said this week, “if major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.”