Swiss bank Credit Suisse kept fortunes of people linked to corruption

A data leak reveals that for years the bank Swiss Credit Suisse he kept fortunes of people linked to corruption from all over the world, including sanctioned businessmen or human rights violators, for a combined value of about 100,000 million dollars, according to The New York Times published this Sunday.

The newspaper is part of a consortium of almost 50 media outlets that, coordinated by the non-profit organization “Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project”, have analyzed the data of some 18,000 Swiss bank accounts leaked a year ago to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an unidentified person, an investigation baptized as the “Swiss Secrets”.

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The whistleblower told the media consortium in a note that Swiss bank secrecy laws were “immoral“, and I add: “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is a mere fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators with tax evaders”according to the Journal.

The filtration, which follows in the wake of others such as the “Panama Papers”reveals that Credit Suisse opened accounts and served as clients between the 1940s and the 2010s “not just the ultra-rich, but also people whose troubled situations would have been obvious to anyone putting their names into a search engine” like Google.

The bank allegedly ignored alerts from its own employees about “suspicious activities” in the finances of its clients, including those accused of corruption around the state oil company of Venezuela; government figures in the Middle East or senior intelligence officials from collaborating countries with USA in the war against terrorism, as well as their families.

Among those account holders with millionaire balances, the former Venezuelan energy deputy minister Nervis Villalobos is cited; the sons of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Alaa and Gamal Mubarak; King Abdullah II of Jordan; or the sons of a Pakistani intelligence official, Akhtar Abdur Rahman Khan, who helped funnel money from the US and other countries to the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Some of those figures, such as Mubarak’s sons or the Jordanian king, have denied that their storage of funds in the second largest entity in the Swiss system corresponded to improper conduct.

A spokeswoman for Credit Suisse, Candice Sun, told the NYT that the entity “rejects” the allegations and argued that many of the accounts in question are already closed, highlighting that everything corresponds to a discredit campaign “against the bank and the Swiss financial market, which has been subjected to to important changes in the last decades.

However, a former director of Switzerland’s anti-money laundering agency, Daniel Thelesklaf, said Swiss banks have long been legally prohibited from accepting money linked to criminal activities, noting that the law generally does not has been harshly applied.

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Source: Elcomercio

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