Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge called for ex-HSBC risk chair Rona Fairhead to quit the BBC.
During the HSBC hearing, Hodge said:
"You are either incredibly naive or totally incompetent. I don’t think that the record that you have shown in your performance here as a guardian of HSBC gives me the confidence that you should be the guardian of the BBC licence fee payers’ money. I reallly do think that you should consider your position and you should think about resigning and if not, I think the government should sack you."
She went on to attack claims by Chris Meares that he was unaware of the bank’s involvement in tax evasion, saying:
"If you look at the data, a third of the data is stuff that is entered by the customer relations managers about the individuals. There are pages of this, absolutely pages, of total collusion by the bank, in your name, in tax evasion.
"This is your guys saying to you: “I contacted this guy by phone saying unless he changed his situation he would be subject to UK tax.”
"Next one. “This client has been informed several times on ESD” - that’s the European directive - “even by being visited in London”. So the idea that this was contained in Switzerland is a nonsense.
"Either you were incompetent, completely and utterly incompetent in your oversight, or you knew about it. This is tax avoidance on an industrial scale."
Details leaked last month from bank accounts totalling £78bn in assets show that HSBC routinely helped wealthy UK customers to avoid paying taxes.
The leaked documents, obtained collectively by news organisations including the Guardian and French daily Le Monde, found that almost 7,000 Britons were hiding funds in offshore Swiss bank accounts.
According to the documents, HSBC allowed customers to withdraw lump sums of varying currencies with few questions, helped clients to conceal bank accounts from UK tax authorities, and marketed schemes known to aid in tax avoidance.
Deliberately hiding money to avoid paying tax is illegal, and the bank now faces criminal charges in countries worldwide.
The Bank has also come under fire for providing banking services to "high-risk" individuals, including drug dealers, relatives of dictators, and people implicated in the illegal African 'blood-diamond' trade.
Hodge went on to criticise both Meares and Fairhead for not taking responsibility for the bank's involvement.
She concluded:
"In the public sector, if things go wrong on your watch, whether or not you were individually involved, you accept responsibility and resign. Neither of you, nobody in the bank, either at this hearing or at the hearing at the Treasury select committee, has deigned to accept responsibility for what was a massive, massive, illegal, terrible tax evasion."
