HSBC chairman Douglas Flint on Tuesday warned that the banking titan could move activities from London to continental Europe ahead of Brexit. Britain is due to trigger Article 50 by late March, kicking off a two-year process to leave the European Union. The nation's financial sector has long feared the loss of "passporting" rights - which allows EU member states to trade across national borders. That provides a crucial gateway for companies to access the rest of the bloc.
"The impact (from the loss of passporting) would start to be seen far before the end of the Article 50 process because there would be a period of time necessary to adjust our" activities, Flint told lawmakers on parliament's Treasury Select Committee. "We would take pre-emptive actions in order to ensure that we have the capacity in place... to continue to deliver what we deliver today.
"That would require us to move activities (...) to France or indeed Ireland or Holland or any other place in Europe where we have operations. It would be something like 1,000 jobs." Flint added that the government's lack of Brexit guidance "would lead to people thinking earlier as to where to move jobs".
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