staff leave in protest but it also won the company some praise; Institutional Investor magazine quoted HSBC's then chairman, Sir John Bond, as saying: "We had corporate clients come up to us and say, 'Thank God you've taken a stand'". In the year before becoming chief executive, Green earned below £1m; HSBC's annual report for the period showed that none of the company's five top-earning employees was a board member. Green told The Guardian in October 2003: "Plenty of people in this organisation earn more than me. I genuinely don't care. I can hardly be described as lowly paid. Since when was money the be-all and end-all?" Asked by the newspaper's reporter Jill Treanor how he reconciled the organization's high salaries and bonuses with his religious faith, he replied: "Do I personally feel some kind of incompatibility between what I believe and being in financial services markets? I can only say no". His appointment as group chief executive took effect on 1 June 2003. Shortly afterwards, in October 2003, HSBC announced that it would offshore the work done by its UK finance processing centres in Birmingham, Sheffield, Brentwood and Swansea to India, Malaysia and China within two years. The move, which represented the largest such offshoring in the financial services sector at that time and would lead to the loss of 4,000 British jobs, led the UK trade union UNIFI to warn Green that the "gloves were off". He defended the decision, telling The Guardians Jill Treanor: "If you are a responsible company like us we do need to think about this on a global basis. We have to approach this in a responsible and human way. I also have to bear in mind that people are going to get jobs in India (and elsewhere). It's wrong to pretend you can protect the existing jobs and wrong to pretend there isn't going to be change. It can't be the right response to say that emerging markets have no right to jobs." He added: "Cost minimisation cannot be the only driver of this. There is no way we want to jeopardise the quality of customer service". Green also oversaw HSBC's acquisition of Household International, a US subprime lender, as well as its integration into the parent company. He later came to regret the deal, which was the largest acquisition in a series conducted by HSBC in the five years leading up