PUBLISHED: 21:10 GMT, 31 May 2013 | UPDATED: 21:46 GMT, 31 May 2013

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2334100/Six-months-money-laundering-allegations-MI5-spy-chief-recruited-HSBC-help-flush-toxins.html

HSBC has recruited the former boss of MI5 to help clean up its act, six months after the bank paid £1.25billion to settle money-laundering allegations in the US.

The bank announced the appointment of former intelligence chief Sir Jonathan Evans as a non-executive director for three years, on an annual £125,000 salary.

Evans was director-general of the domestic intelligence service between 2007 and 2013 and will have specific responsibility for identifying weak points in the firm’s financial systems.

HSBC pointed to his 33 years of experience in security, particularly in the increasingly crucial area of countering cyber-terrorism and other online threats.

It comes just six months after HSBC was fined £1.25billion for failing to put sufficient controls in place to prevent money-laundering on behalf of terrorists and drug lords.

The scandal prompted HSBC chief executive Stuart Gulliver to say that he wanted the bank to be at the forefront of fighting financial crime.

He also set up the Financial Systems Vulnerabilities Committee, of which Evans will be a member.

The bank is understood to have been keen to bring in someone familiar with the latest trends in cyber-crime, to ensure it was not resolving failings of the past, only to ignore new threats. Chairman Douglas Flint said: ‘His experience and expertise gained from a career at the highest level of public service combating threats to data security, critical infrastructure and from international terrorism and organised crime will be of considerable value to the board as it addresses its governance of systemic threats.’

Evans will become the second ‘Bond’ to join the firm’s board, following  former chairman Sir John who stepped down in 2006.

But while Ian Fleming’s hero was an MI6 man, Evans’ background is in the domestic security service MI5, based on Millbank next to the River Thames.

The appointment is just the latest in a long line of MI5 chiefs to walk through the revolving door between the security  services and the City.

Dame Stella Rimington, who ran MI5 from 1993 to 1996, later took up a non-executive role with Marks & Spencer, where she was chairman of the retailer’s pay committee. She left in 2001 amid criticism of an £800,000 bonus handed to the firm’s then chairman Luc Vandervelde.

Links between business and the country’s top security job have also proved controversial in the past.

Sir Stephen Lander, MI5  director-general from 1996 to 2002, came under fire when it emerged that he was a director of Northgate Information  Solutions, an IT firm that had contracts with every police force in the country.