HSBC 2015 Annual Report Download - page 41

Taxes paid by region
($bn)
2.5
1.2
0.4
0.4
2.8 1.1
$8.4bn
UK
Rest of Europe
Asia
Middle East and North Africa
North America
Latin America
Key
Managing environmental
and social impacts
We continue to reduce the environmental
impact of our operations and have
robust policies and processes to
manage sustainability risks in our
business activities.
We are reducing the amount of energy
we consume, and increasing the
proportion from renewable sources.
We have signed agreements to increase
the percentage of our electricity from
new wind and solar sources to 9%,
and have a target of 25% by 2020. We
report on our carbon dioxide emissions
for the year in the Report of the Directors
on page 98.
Our sustainability risk policies cover
a number of sensitive industries and
themes. After we issued new standards
in our forestry and agricultural commodities
policies in 2014, we took the decision to
stop banking more than 160 customers
as soon as possible because they did
not comply. In 2015, HSBC was
recognised as a leader in the Forest 500
ranking of 150 investors’ policies on
the sustainability of forest commodity
supply chains.
We also support a transition to certified,
sustainable palm oil. Our standards require
our palm oil customers to have all their
operations certified as sustainable by the
end of 2018, and we continue to support
them in meeting this goal.
In 2015, there were more than 2,300
attendances by relationship and risk
managers of training on our sustainability
risk policies to help ensure their
implementation is robust.
Details on our sustainability risk
framework and policies are available
online at www.hsbc.com/citizenship/
sustainability/finance.
Respecting human rights
We apply human rights considerations
directly as they affect our employees
and indirectly through our suppliers and
customers, and through our action to
prevent bribery and corruption. For
example, our code of conduct for suppliers
includes elements related to human rights,
as do our project finance lending and
sustainability risk policies. Our Statement
on Human Rights, issued in 2015, explains
how we do this and is available on our
website. We will integrate the provisions
of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 into our
business and supply chain, and will report
in line with the guidelines published by the
UK government.
We are guided by the International Bill
of Human Rights, and support the UN
Declaration of Human Rights and the
principles concerning fundamental rights
set out in the International Labour
Organisation’s Declaration on Fundamental
Principles and Rights at Work.
Investing in our communities
We believe that education and the
environment are essential to resilient
communities and thriving economies.
For more than 10 years, we focused
our community investment activities
on these two areas. In 2015, following
survey responses from employees, we
decided to add medical charities to the
causes we support.
In 2015, we contributed a total of $205m
to charitable programmes and our
employees volunteered 304,555 hours
in community activities during the
working day.
We marked our 150th year by setting
up an additional fund of $150m to support
causes selected by our employees. It will
support 140 charities across the world
over three years. We also made a one-off
$62m donation to charities in Hong Kong
from the sale of commemorative HK$150
bank notes.
Ensuring sustainable outcomes
Our approach to tax
We apply the spirit as well as the letter
of the law in all territories where we
operate, and have adopted the UK Code
of Practice for the Taxation of Banks. As
a consequence, we pay our fair share of
tax in the countries in which we operate.
We continue to strengthen our processes
to help ensure our banking services are
not associated with any arrangements
known or suspected to be designed to
facilitate tax evasion.
HSBC continued to support global
initiatives to improve tax transparency
such as:
– the US Foreign Account Tax
Compliance Act (‘FATCA’);
– the OECD Standard for Automatic
Exchange of Financial Account
Information (also known as the
Common Reporting Standard);
– the Capital Requirements Directive IV
(‘CRD IV’) Country by Country
Reporting; and
– the OECD Base Erosion and Profit
Shifting (‘BEPS’) initiative.
We do not expect the BEPS initiative
or similar initiatives adopted by national
governments to adversely impact
HSBC’s results.
$205m
donated to
charity in 2015
22%
reduction in our carbon
dioxide emissions
since 2011
Tax
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HSBC HOLDINGS PLC
39
How we do business