Credit Suisse had illicit funds for decades, according to international investigation

Credit Suisse had billions of dollars of funds of criminal or illicit origin for decades, according to an international investigation by several media outlets published on Sunday, allegations that the Swiss financial institution “firmly” rejects.

The investigation was carried out by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a consortium of 48 media outlets including Le Monde, The Guardian, the Miami Herald and La Nación.

The investigation began in the wake of a major data leak that reached the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung anonymously just over a year ago.

The accounts identified by the journalists as potentially problematic had more than $8 billion in assets, according to the OCCRP.

In total, the data analyzed refers to more than 18,000 bank accounts at Credit Suisse between the early 1940s and the late 2010s and belonging to 37,000 people or companies, according to Le Monde newspaper.

“Based on a massive leak of information from thousands of bank accounts managed by Credit Suisse [la investigación] shows that, defying the surveillance rules imposed on large international banks, the establishment, born in Zurich, harbored funds linked to crime and corruption for several decades, ”writes the newspaper.

In a statement, Credit Suisse reacted by saying that the data studied was “biased, inaccurate or taken out of context, resulting in a biased presentation of the bank’s business conduct.”

“90% of the affected accounts have already been closed, more than 60% of which were closed before 2015,” the bank said, adding that it was “conducting an investigation” into the data breach.

The disclosures are mostly concentrated in developing countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America, with clients domiciled in Western Europe only accounting for 1% of the total, according to the newspaper. (I)