someone on the Guardian's board did have such a connection to HSBC in the recent past, and may still have for all I know, but the details are always alot of work with these kinds of issues.
think of it another way: if you were one of the companies The Guardian (and various others faux-anti establishment activist organizations) unsuccessfully attacks, would you:
- directly attack them by stopping them altogether (somehow)
- infiltrate them, and then continue to attack yourself wearing an activist mask, but never do or suggest anything effective
if The Guardian wanted effective opposition to anti-democratic organizations, why have they spent so much time and effort promoting that takes away people's power in more insidious ways? corporate culture was always pushed quite voraciously by The Guardian, just with a different spin on it (as a former Guardian reader, I remember this well)
would it be a big surprise to discover that while hippy-dippy corporation are actually owned by the same handful of Wall Street asset holding mega corporations, that the exact same thing is true of the media groups that promoted the (fake) hippy-dippy corporations? I don't know, but, go figure.