BERN (Parliament Politics Magazine) – The hidden wealth of clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption, and other major crimes has been revealed thanks to a massive leak from Credit Suisse, one of the world’s largest private banks.
The breach, which reveals the beneficiaries of over 100 billion Swiss francs (£80 billion)* kept at one of Switzerland’s most well-known financial institutions, contains details of accounts belonging to 30,000 Credit Suisse clients around the world.
Despite repeated promises over decades to screen out dubious clients and illegal assets, the leak reveals pervasive Credit Suisse due diligence failures. The Guardian is part of a group of journalists who have been given exclusive access to the data.
Credit Suisse frequently opened or maintained bank accounts for a wide range of high-risk clients around the world, according to the study.
A human trafficker in the Philippines, a bribery-charged Hong Kong stock market head, a billionaire who ordered the death of his Lebanese pop star lover, executives who robbed Venezuela’s state oil business, and corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine are among them.
An unknown whistleblower revealed the massive quantity of banking data to the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung. In a statement, the whistleblower source claimed, “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering Swiss banks’ shameful role as collaborators of tax evaders.”
Credit Suisse stated that tight banking privacy regulations in Switzerland barred it from responding to specific client allegations.
The bank statement states, “Credit Suisse strongly rejects the allegations and inferences about the bank’s purported business practises,” It claimed that the revelations are based on “selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank’s business conduct.”
The Credit Suisse breach has left the bank with a lot of unanswered issues.
However, the bank faces difficult concerns as a result of the simultaneous revelations by 48 media outlets. They will ring familiar to anyone who has been following the succession of scandals in recent years.
Has Credit Suisse shown a high level of tolerance for high-risk customers? Has it gone far enough in terms of bolstering internal due diligence controls? Was there a culture in which bankers covered their ears and turned a blind eye while collecting or keeping money from shady clients, especially public figures suspected of corruption? Is it true that profit took precedence over ethics?
These are previous issues involving a small percentage of its customers is history, the bank claimed in its reaction to the media. It claims to have kept up with banking rules across the board, instituting a strict zero-tolerance stance toward tax evasion and stringent counter money laundering controls.
Credit Suisse has yet spent decades apologising for previous atrocities, only to have additional skeletons emerge from its closets.
Axel Lehmann, the bank’s recently appointed chairman, will be hoping that the Swiss secrets leak is simply another public relations disaster for the bank, which has had plenty of them. In the last six months, the lender admitted to cheating investors in the famous Mozambique “tuna bonds” lending scam, and Lehmann’s immediate predecessor, António Horta-Osório, resigned due to Covid regulatory violations.
