"Leaked data on more than 18,000
accounts shows that the Swiss bank missed or ignored red flags.
The client rosters of Swiss banks
are among the world’s most closely guarded secrets, protecting the identities
of some of the planet’s richest people and clues into how they accumulated
their fortunes.
Now, an extraordinary leak of data
from Credit Suisse, one of the world’s most iconic banks, is exposing how the
bank held hundreds of millions of dollars for heads of state, intelligence
officials, sanctioned businessmen and human rights abusers, among many others.
A self-described whistle-blower
leaked data on more than 18,000 bank accounts, collectively holding more than $100
billion, to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The newspaper shared the data with a nonprofit journalism group, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project,
and 46 other news organizations around the world, including The New York Times.
The data covers accounts that were open from the 1940s until
well into the 2010s but not the bank’s current operations.
Among the people listed as holding
amounts worth millions of dollars in Credit Suisse accounts were King Abdullah
II of Jordan and the two sons of the former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak.
Other account holders included sons of a Pakistani intelligence chief who helped
funnel billions of dollars from the United States and other countries to the
mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Venezuelan officials ensnared in a
long-running corruption scandal.
The leak shows that Credit Suisse
opened accounts for and continued to serve not only the ultrawealthy but also
people whose problematic backgrounds would have been obvious to anyone who ran
their names through a search engine.
Swiss banks have long faced legal
prohibitions on taking money linked to criminal activity, said Daniel Thelesklaf,
the former head of Switzerland’s anti-money laundering agency. But, he said,
the law generally hasn’t been enforced.
Candice Sun, a spokeswoman for the
bank, said in a statement that “Credit Suisse strongly rejects the allegations
and inferences about the bank’s purported business practices.” She said many of
the accounts in the leak date back decades to “a time where laws, practices and
expectations of financial institutions were very different from where they are
now.”
Ms. Sun said that while Credit
Suisse can’t comment on specific clients, many of the accounts identified in
the leaked database have already been closed. “Of the remaining active
accounts, we are comfortable that appropriate due diligence, reviews and other
control related steps were taken, including pending account closures,” she
said.
Ms. Sun added that the leak appears
to be part of “a concerted effort to discredit the bank and the Swiss financial
marketplace, which has undergone significant changes over the last several
years.”
The leak follows the so-called Panama Papers in 2016, the Paradise Papers in 2017 and the Pandora Papers last year. They all
shed light on the secretive workings of banks, law firms and offshore
financial-services providers that allow wealthy people and institutions —
including those accused of crimes — to move huge sums of money, largely outside
the purview of tax collectors or law enforcement.
The new disclosures are likely to
intensify legal and political scrutiny of the Swiss banking industry and, in
particular, Credit Suisse. The bank is already reeling from the abrupt ousters of its two top executives.
With its ironclad bank-secrecy laws, Switzerland has long
been a haven for people who are looking to hide money. In the past decade, that
has made the country’s largest banks — especially its two giants, Credit Suisse
and UBS — a target for the authorities in the United States and elsewhere who
are trying to crack down on tax evasion, money laundering and other crimes.
In 2014, Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to
conspiring to help Americans file false tax returns and agreed to pay fines, penalties and restitution
totaling $2.6 billion.
Three years later, the bank paid the Justice Department
$5.3 billion to settle allegations about its marketing of
mortgage-backed securities. Last fall, it agreed to pay $475 million to U.S. and British
authorities to resolve an investigation into a kickback and bribery scheme in
Mozambique. And this month, a trial got underway in Switzerland in
which Credit Suisse is accused of allowing drug traffickers to launder millions
of euros through the bank.
The Justice Department and the
Senate Finance Committee are also looking into
whether U.S. citizens continue to hold undeclared accounts at the bank.
Several former Credit Suisse
employees told federal prosecutors late last year that the bank continued to
hide hundreds of millions of dollars for clients long after its 2014 guilty
plea, according to a whistle-blower lawsuit filed last year by a former bank
official and a lawyer for other former employees. (The suit was dismissed after
the Justice Department said it “threatens to interfere with ongoing discussions
with Credit Suisse” about dealing with Swiss bank accounts held by U.S.
citizens.)
The media consortium has nicknamed
the latest leak “Suisse Secrets.” Of the more than 18,000 bank accounts
involved, roughly 100 U.S. citizens held accounts, but none are public figures.
Among the biggest revelations is
that Credit Suisse continued to do business with customers even after bank
officials flagged suspicious activity involving their finances.
One account holder was Venezuela’s
former vice minister of energy, Nervis Villalobos.
Employees in Credit Suisse’s
compliance department had reason to be wary of doing business with him. The
bank had a 2008 report by an outside due-diligence firm detailing corruption
allegations involving Mr. Villalobos and Venezuela’s state-owned oil company,
Petróleos de Venezuela, according to a Spanish police report obtained by the
media consortium. (The Times reviewed the report.)
Credit Suisse nonetheless opened an
account for him in 2011, the leaked bank data shows. The account, which was
closed in 2013, held as much as $10 million.
Lawyers for Mr. Villalobos, who was criminally charged by the
Justice Department in 2017, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
All told, there were 25 Credit
Suisse accounts, containing a total of about $270 million, that belonged to
people accused of being involved in a wide-ranging conspiracy surrounding
Venezuela’s oil company. The accounts remained open after the scandal started
to become public, but were closed by the time criminal charges were filed.
The bank also kept accounts open for
a Zimbabwean businessman who was sanctioned by U.S.
and European authorities for his ties to the government of the country’s
longtime president, Robert Mugabe. The accounts stayed open for several months
after the sanctions were imposed.
The leaked bank information included many accounts linked to
government officials across the Middle East and beyond. The data raises
questions about how public officials and their relatives accumulated vast
fortunes in a region rife with corruption.
The sons of former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Alaa
and Gamal Mubarak, held a total of six accounts at various points, including
one in 2003 that was worth $196 million.
In a statement to The New York
Times, the Mubaraks’ lawyers declined to comment about specific accounts but
said the suggestion that any of the Mubaraks’ assets had been “tainted by any
illegality or a result of any favoritism or use of influence” would be “both
unfounded and defamatory.”
Any assets they held, the statement
said, were from their “successful professional business activities.”
King Abdullah II of Jordan, one of the few officials in the
leaks who remains in power, had six accounts, including one whose balance
exceeded $224 million.
Jordan’s Royal Hashemite Court said
in a statement that there had been no “unlawful or improper conduct” in
relation to the bank accounts. They held portions of the king’s private wealth,
which was used for personal expenses, royal projects to help Jordanians and the
maintenance of Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem, of which he is the custodian.
Senior intelligence officials and
their offspring from several countries that cooperated with the United States
in the war on terrorism also had money stashed at Credit Suisse.
As the head of the Pakistani intelligence agency, General
Akhtar Abdur Rahman Khan helped funnel billions of dollars in cash and other
aid from the United States and other countries to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan
to support their fight against the Soviet Union.
In 1985, the same year President
Ronald Reagan called for more oversight of the aid going into Afghanistan, an
account was opened in the name of three of General Khan’s sons. (The general
never faced charges of stealing aid money.) Years later, the account would grow
to hold $3.7 million, the leaked records show.
Two of the general’s sons, Akbar and
Haroon Khan, did not respond to requests for comment from the reporting
project. In a text message, a third son, Ghazi Khan, called information about
the accounts “not correct,” adding, “The content is conjectural.”
In 2003, the year that the United States invaded Iraq to
topple Saddam Hussein, Saad Kheir, the head of Jordan’s intelligence agency,
opened an account that would eventually hold $21.6 million.
The account was closed after Mr.
Kheir’s death in 2009.
The family of Mr. Mubarak’s long-serving and brutal
spymaster, Omar Suleiman, had an account, too. Mr. Suleiman died in 2012. Efforts by the
reporting project to reach his family were unsuccessful.
The leaked records were provided to
Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung more than a year ago by an unidentified
whistle-blower. Of the dozens of news organizations collaborating on the
project, none were based in Switzerland, where a 2015 law restricted journalists
from writing articles based on internal bank data.
The whistle-blower said in a
statement to the media consortium that Swiss bank-secrecy laws were “immoral.”
“The pretext of protecting financial
privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as
collaborators of tax evaders,” the whistle-blower said."
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