The leak of data from more than 18,000 accounts of one of the largest private banks in the world, Credit Suisse, exposed the hidden wealth of clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other crimes around the world. An international press consortium, which includes newspapers such as the British The Guardian and the American The New York Times, revealed the case this Sunday (20).
The data was initially provided to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous whistleblower, who said he considered Swiss bank secrecy laws “immoral”. In a statement, he said that under “the guise of protecting financial privacy”, these institutions become “collaborators of tax evaders”.
The content of the leak, which covers open accounts from the 1940s to the 2010s, was shared by the German outlet with the nonprofit Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and 46 other publications worldwide. The leak was dubbed the “Suisse Secrets” consortium.
According to reports, among the bank’s clients were executives who looted Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, the two sons of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah II of Jordan, a human trafficker in the Philippines, a director of the stock exchange from Hong Kong arrested for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend, and corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine.
The 18,000 accounts combined contained more than $100 billion.
Swiss banks are legally prohibited from receiving money linked to criminal activities, but the leak suggests that Credit Suisse has failed to live up to “repeated promises made over decades to weed out bad debts and illicit funds”, in the words of the Guardian.
According to the New York Times, the bank accepted as clients people with a known bad reputation, who should have undergone a risk assessment.
Contacted by the consortium’s media, Credit Suisse said the reports contain “selective information taken out of context, resulting in biased interpretations of the bank’s business”, and that Switzerland’s strict bank secrecy laws prevent the company from commenting on related claims. to individual customers.
The bank also said the claims are largely old-fashioned, but the consortium claims that more than two-thirds were opened after the year 2000, many of them were still open until the last decade and a part still operate today. THE sheet sought advice from the institution in Brazil, but had not received a response until the publication of this text.
Credit Suisse has been at the center of major scandals recently. Last month, its president, António Horta-Osório, resigned for having violated Covid-19 pandemic restrictions twice.
This February, it became the first major bank in Swiss history to face criminal charges related to an allegation that it helped launder money from the cocaine trade on behalf of the Bulgarian mafia.
For the Guardian, the repercussions of the leak could go beyond the bank itself, becoming a crisis for Switzerland, which has one of the most secret banking laws in the world.
