The bank executive was listed as the beneficial owner of an account in the name of Worcester Equities Inc, an anonymous company registered in Panama, containing a balance in 2007 of $7.6 million. It was through this entity that Gulliver’s HSBC bonuses were paid until 2003. He also held a second account in the name of Worcester Foundation, which had been closed before 2007.

Although now based in the UK, where HSBC has its headquarters, Gulliver is domiciled in Hong Kong for legal and tax purposes.

However, Schaeuble, who in recent weeks had taken a tough line on Greece, also said that "as long as the programme is not successfully concluded, there will be no payment." Athens will get an extension of four months, not six, as it had requested, according to an eurozone top official.

In return, Greece has committed to make a series of unspecified reforms to be enacted over the coming months. Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis claimed the deal was a win for his country because his government will be able to decide what reforms to propose. The agreement will mean that Greece will avoid going bankrupt, at least over the four months of the extension.

It should also mean that capital controls won't be needed and that Greek banks will have enough money to stock up their ATMs. To get the money though, the Greek government has one more hurdle to clear. On Monday, it has to present a series of unspecified economic reforms measures that are deemed acceptable by creditors and rooted in Greece's previously enacted bailout agreement - something the government had promised not to do.

The deal is widely regarded as a major climb down for the PM, who won power vowing to reverse budget cuts. He hailed the agreement as a "decisive step" that "achieved much" towards ending austerity, but added: "We have a long and difficult road ahead." The BBC's Mark Lowen in Athens says the government is engaged in a hard-sell to the Greek people over the deal.

It was reached on Friday in talks between Greece, eurozone ministers and the IMF in Brussels. The Greek cabinet is due to meet to discuss it later on Saturday. No details have emerged about the list of reforms, which must be approved by creditors before eurozone members ratify the bailout extension on Tuesday. Analysts say a collapse of the deal would revive fears of an exit from the euro, a so-called "grexit" - something both the EU and Greece say they want to avoid.

Greece and Germany have stepped back from the brink. And for now Greece remains in the eurozone. But there will be months of fraught negotiations before it will be clear whether the economy and finances of this recession-battered nation have been put back on a stable footing. In fact, what was agreed on Friday night guarantees there will be no fresh crisis - no fears of Greece quitting the eurozone - for a full two days.

Because by Monday night, the Syriza government has to submit a preliminary list of proposed economic reforms - which will form the basis of negotiations till the end of April on a new financial settlement for the country. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble stressed on Friday that there would be no payment of new funds to Greece until the conditions of the deal had been met. Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said he would work night and day until Monday to devise the list of reforms. "If the list of reforms is not agreed, this agreement is dead," he admitted.

Misrata operates as a city-state, with its own semiautonomous government. Most of its income comes from iron and cement factories, and it is a magnet for foreign investors. As such, Misrata also poses a temptation to ISIS, which seeks to expand its economic base for its operations in the Middle East and, like any economic institution, wants to diversify its sources of revenue.

But as in Syria, it is a challenge to draw the map of control of ISIS and the other Islamic organizations in Libya — with the exception of Darna, Sirte and parts of Benghazi, where ISIS has near-total control. The war between the numerous militias in the streets of Libya’s main cities and the absence of a unified leadership — the country has two rival governments — presents an impossible challenge to international forces trying to evaluate their options.

In a special session of the UN Security Council on Wednesday that was convened after the Egyptian airstrikes on Darna, which ISIS controls, Egypt proposed the creation of an international military coalition to fight ISIS in Libya as well as the removal of the arms embargo on Libya, in order to let the recognized government acquire the weapons it needs to fight the Islamic State.

In our super-connected 21st-century world, rather than promoting economic fairness, the net is a central reason for the growing gulf between rich and poor and the hollowing out of the middle classes. Its cultural ramifications are equally chilling. Rather than creating transparency and openness, it secretly gathers information and keeps a watch on each and every one of us.

You need only have read the stories this month about how smart TVs can spy on us in our living rooms to realise that Orwell’s vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a Big Brother society, is becoming a reality. Because such TVs are connected to the internet, they can watch us and listen to us, then beam that information around the world for companies to use for commercial gain. And thanks to the explosion in social media, rather than creating more democracy, the internet is empowering mob rule.

This month, after years of social networks being scarred by appalling personal abuse and bullying - leading to several suicides - Twitter, which has 288 million users a month, finally admitted there was ‘no excuse’ for its failure to stop its users sending vile messages to the targets of their hatred. The company’s boss, Dick Costolo, admitted: ‘I’m frankly ashamed at how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue. It’s absurd.’

As the internet transforms every electronic object into a connected device, we are drifting into a world where everything — our fitness, what we eat, our driving habits, how hard we work — can be profitably quantified by companies such as Google. Faceless data-gatherers wearing all-seeing electronic glasses watch our every move. Our networked society is like a claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community in which there are no longer any secrets or any anonymity.

We are observed by every unloving institution of the new digital surveillance state, from big data companies and the Government to insurance companies, healthcare providers and the police. Google and Facebook boast that they know us more intimately than we know ourselves. They know what we did yesterday, today and, with the help of predictive technology, what we will do tomorrow. And it is, frankly, our fault for choosing to live in a crystal republic where cars, mobile phones and televisions — hooked up to the internet — watch us.

This, of course, is the same Prime Minister – recently labelled a 'foreign policy irrelevance' by an ex-British Nato commander – who is backing a law to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid, but won't commit to the Nato target of dedicating 2 per cent of GDP to defence.

To spend £12 billion on posturing over aid while winding down Britain's defences is not only mad. With the expansionist Mr Putin rampant, it's also a dereliction of his first duty to keep our citizens safe.

"To put it very bluntly Mugabe has won," said Richard Dowden, director of the London-based Royal African Society. "An immense amount of Western pressure to step down and reverse some of his policies -- and he's done neither." "If his aim was to rule Zimbabwe and become the king of Zimbabwe for a long time, and whatever happened to the country he would stay there and become a continent-wide hero, I think he's achieved those aims," Dowden said.

"The fact that Zimbabwe has been ruined in the process and it's now just run by thieves who call themselves ministers, looting the place continually, I don't think that worries him a bit." In an interview with the Zimbabwe Independent on Friday, Didymus Mutasa, a long-time Mugabe ally who was expelled from the ruling party this week, said: "His legacy is in ruins and the party of liberation is in tatters and shambles."

Critics say Mugabe has turned the 'breadbasket of southern Africa' into a basket case, with human rights, justice and democracy trampled.

Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, said there can be no agreement if the EMU creditor powers continue to insist that Greece sticks to the terms of its EU-IMF Troika bail-out and increase its primary budget surplus from 1.5 percent to 4.5 percent of GDP by next year.

“We have bent over backwards to reach an accord. We are perfectly prepared to refrain from any moves that would jeopardize financial stability or Greek competitiveness. But what we cannot accept is that the fiscal adjustment, agreed by the last government, be carried through just because the rules say so,” he told The Telegraph. The defiant stand by the Leftist Syriza government raises the risk of an irreversible showdown when finance ministers from the Eurogroup converge on Brussels on Friday for yet another emergency meeting.

While there is mounting irritation in EU circles over Germany’s refusal to give ground, and signs of a Franco-German rift are emerging, the Greeks are on thin ice. Failure to agree a deal could set off a chain-reaction as capital flight accelerates, leading ineluctably to a sovereign default and ejection from the euro.

It was the collapse of US house prices back in 2007 that resulted in the seizure of the credit markets and banking crisis of 2008. And it would be easy to lay the blame for the 2008 financial crisis at the doorstep of American home owners, easy but wrong. The collapse of the US housing market was not the cause of the crisis, it was merely a symptom of the more insidious ills of cheap credit, low risk and the promise of another bailout round the corner.

The Keynesian pump priming that has taken place on a colossal scale across the world is failing. The Chinese economy was growing at 12 percent in 2010, but that slowed to 7.7 percent in 2013 and 7.4 percent last year — its weakest in 24 years. Economists expect Chinese growth to slow to 7 percent this year. It is the once booming property sector that has turned into a bust, and is now dragging down the wider economy as the bubble deflates.

The second global credit crisis is now already unfolding in China some 6,800 miles away from the epicentre of the first in the US. The bonds of Chinese real estate companies are now falling like dominoes. Kaisa, a Shenzhen-based, Hong Kong-listed developer that raised $2.5 billion on international markets had to be bailed out by rival group Sunac last week after it defaulted on its debts. The bonds of other Chinese real estate groups such as Glorious Property and Fantasia have also sold off heavily as the contagion spreads.

The strain in its banking system is highlighted by the elevated levels of the Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate (SHIBOR), which shows Chinese banks are worried about lending to each other. There is no schadenfreude in watching China unravel. The idea that this is an isolated incident is laughable, remember the very same was said of US subprime. The problem is that banks such as Standard Chartered and HSBC have both rapidly increased their lending operations in Asia since 2008.

Loans are very easy to make, it is getting the money back that is tricky. If loans go bad in Asia they will ultimately have to be recognised on the very same group balance sheet from which finance is extended here in the UK. So, the contagion can quickly spread from the Chinese property market to a poorly funded UK bank that has never set foot in Asia. That is because UK banks borrow billions in short term funding from each other. Loan losses in China can very quickly become a UK problem.

With the barbaric murder of Lieutenant Muath al-Kaseasbeh — the Jordanian pilot locked in a cage and burned alive by operatives of the Islamic State, for all the world to see — Jordan’s King Abdullah faces the most dangerous moment since ascending to the throne in 1999.

While Jordan has remained a source of calm in the region, the roots of radical Islamic extremism run deep there. A Jordanian, Abu Musab Zarqawi, was the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq - the precursor to ISIS - before he was killed by a US airstrike on June 7, 2006. Today, an estimated 2,000 Jordanian nationals are fighting with ISIS. What happens when they come back to Jordan? Meanwhile, 1.3 million people, mostly Muslims, have fled Syria and are currently residing in Jordan. Some 600,000 are contained inside refugee camps. The rest are freely moving about the country. How many are plotting against the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and how advanced and sophisticated are their plans?

The good news is that King Abdullah understands full well that he is in a winner-take-all showdown with ISIS, which he describes as a Third World war. As a descendent of the Prophet Muhammad, the king sees himself as a moderate Arab reformer. He believes Islam is the answer to the challenges facing his region, but he does not believe violent jihad is the way forward. He has built good relations with the West, maintains a solid peace treaty with Israel, and has worked hard to protect Christians in Jordan. But he is acutely aware that the jihadists are gunning for him. Indeed, upon hearing the news of the pilot’s murder, he immediately cut short his visit to Washington and returned to Amman to launch an earth-shaking military response to ISIS.

The urgent question right now is whether American leaders fully understand just how catastrophic it would be for Jordan to fall to ISIS, and whether they are truly committed to taking all measures necessary to crush ISIS and stand firm with Jordan, one of our most important Arab allies.

In Europe, the Swiss, Danish and Swedish authorities have all moved to impose punitive negative interest rates in a bid to prevent their currencies from rocketing in value. The Swiss kicked off this round of devaluation with a shock decision to abandon its de facto peg with the euro in January. The Riksbank has gone further and will begin its own round of bond-buying in response to the ECB's moves.

Denmark meanwhile, has been forced to lower rates four times in three weeks and purchase €32 billion in foreign exchange to prevent the krone from developing into a safe haven for investors. This co-ordinated central bank action is reviving the "ghosts of the 1930s", according to investment bank Morgan Stanley.

In the inter-war period, European economies that left the Gold Standard saw their new fiat currencies weaken, provoking a domino effect of devaluation across the Continent.

This operation, first disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story has been criticized for bypassing due process; the government is pressuring the financial industry to cut off the companies' access to banking services, without first having shown that the targeted companies are violating the law.

As reported by the St Louis Post-Dispatch, critics believe "it's a thinly veiled ideological attack on industries the Obama administration doesn't like, such as gun sellers and coal producers." The operation itself is now under investigation by two federal agencies.

The warning, issued Wednesday, replaced a travel warning issued in early September, and placed much more emphasis on dangers to US citizens from terror attacks in well-traveled areas. The notice warned that “the July-August 2014 Gaza conflict and subsequent political and religious tension associated with access to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem led to increased levels of violence, particularly in Jerusalem and West Bank environs, not seen in those areas in a decade.”

US citizens accounted for a high number of victims in a string of terror attacks that rocked the Jerusalem area in the fall, including a three-month-old baby run over by an East Jerusalem driver, and three US-born rabbis killed in an attack on a synagogue.