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Earlier this month, Oudea defended SocGen over the Panama Papers
revelations during a two-hour grilling by lawmakers, rejected
accusations the French lender was at the heart of tax evasion.
"The committee (of senior senators) decided that although the
statements in question might have contained some ambiguity, they
could not be qualified as false testimony," the Senate said in a
statement.
At issue were accusations that Oudea misled senators when he
told a Senate committee in 2012 that his bank had closed
operations in Panama and other tax havens identified as overly
secretive or short of international transparency standards.
Oudea was thrust to the fore of a controversy over the use of
secretive tax havens in April after an investigative news
syndicate exposed the activities of Panama law firm Mossack
Fonseca.
The reports, based on 11.5 million leaked documents, put SocGen
near the top of a list of banks around the world that had
created hundreds of thousands of shell companies in Panama and
other offshore centers between 1977 and 2015.
At the public hearing in May, Oudea reiterated that the bank had
no offices or staff in Panama as of 2012, as he had told the
Senate committee that year, when he was also head of France's
banking association.
(Reporting by Julien Ponthus; Writing by Maya Nikolaeva; Editing
by Mark Heinrich)
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