text: BBC Trust chairman Rona Fairhead is facing calls to step down immediately as a director of HSBC over her links to the bank’s tax scandal. Mrs Fairhead, 53, has said she wants to stay for a least another year, but yesterday it emerged that two major investors and a leading shareholder group have voted to get rid of her. She has been under mounting pressure to quit both of her lucrative positions, at the BBC and the scandal-hit bank, after claims that HSBC’s Swiss operation helped wealthy clients hide billions from the taxman. Facing vote: Rona Fairhead is facing calls to step down immediately as a director of HSNC over her links to the bank's tax scandal . Last month she was criticised by MPs as ‘incredibly naïve or totally incompetent’ for her failure to pick up on the scandal. And last night it emerged that American investors Christian Brothers Investment Services and Trillium Asset Management, which manage more than £4.9billion of assets between them, have lodged their votes to get rid of Mrs Fairhead as a non-executive director on HSBC’s main board. One of the UK’s most powerful shareholder groups has also urged investors to vote against her re-election as an independent director at the bank’s annual general meeting next week. In a note to investors, the Pensions & Investment Research Consultants – which advises pension funds and other institutional investors managing £1.5trillion – said: ‘Ms Fairhead chaired the HSBC audit committee up until 2010, a period when the company’s Swiss arm was allegedly undertaking tax avoidance and evasion on behalf of clients. Scandal: There are claims that HSBC’s Swiss operation helped wealthy clients hide billions from the taxman . ‘Given the lack of control and oversight of this practice, it is considered that Ms Fairhead failed in her responsibility as a guardian of HSBC.’ But HSBC has told shareholders that Mrs Fairhead, who has been on the board of the embattled bank since 2004, has ‘agreed to stay on the board for a further one-year period’ – the maximum she can be voted in for. Non-executive directors at publicly listed companies must be elected on an annual basis, regardless of how long they intend to stay. A source said that both she and the bank would ‘assess’ whether she should stand for re-election in 2016 ‘closer to the time’. Public accounts committee chairman, Margaret Hodge, told Mrs Fairhead she should resign or be sacked by the Government as BBC Trust chairman . HSBC declined to comment. Last year Mrs Fairhead received more than £513,000 in fees and benefits for her work at the troubled bank, including a £334,000 fee as non-executive chairman of HSBC North America Holdings. PIRC said the huge pay package ‘could be considered to compromise her ability to scrutinise the bank’s activities independently’. Mrs Fairhead also earns £110,000-a-year for her three-day-a-week job as chairman of the BBC Trust, and a further £130,000 as a non-executive director of the fizzy drinks giant Pepsi. Many MPs expected her to resign from HSBC, especially after her bruising encounter with the Commons public accounts committee. Its chairman, Margaret Hodge, told her she should resign or be sacked by the Government as chairman of the BBC Trust, because she had done her job at HSBC so poorly. ‘Either you knew [about the tax evasion] or you didn’t know – and I think in that case that you are either incredibly naive or totally incompetent,’ she said. Mrs Fairhead told MPs that she had not been aware of any wrongdoing. She said she had relied on various committees and structures to flag up problems, and was ‘horrified’ when they later discovered what was happening.
target: Rona Fairhead is facing immediate calls to step down as director of HSBC .
  It's after claims Swiss arm helped wealthy clients hide billions from taxman .
  She was criticised by MPs as 'incredibly naive' for failing to notice scandal .
  American investors lodged their votes to get rid of the BBC Trust chairman .