A data leak known this weekend revealed that for years the Swiss bank Credit Suisse received on consignment fortunes from people linked to cases of corruption and human rights violations around the world.
The revelation, published simultaneously in newspapers around the world, including Argentina’s La Nación, The New York Times and The Guardian, indicates that the bank had funds worth some US$100 billion belonging to those accounts.
The investigation was carried out by a consortium of about 50 media outlets that are part of the “Report on organized crime and corruption” project.
Among the most relevant findings, it is pointed out how a group of Venezuelan executives, accused of looting the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, deposited large sums of money in Credit Suisse accounts.
Among them are the former Vice Minister of Energy, Nervis Villalobos, and Luis Carlos de León, former Director of Finance for Electricidad de Caracas.
Accounts were also found in the name of a people smuggler in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his girlfriend, a Lebanese pop star, and numerous politicians accused of corruption. in various countries, from Egypt to Ukraine.
The information was released after months in which journalists of different nationalities analyzed the leak of nearly 18,000 Swiss bank accounts by an unidentified person to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The investigation, known as the “Swiss Secret,” also includes statements from the individual who leaked the documents, calling Swiss bank secrecy laws “immoral.”
For its part, Credit Suisse said in a statement that Switzerland’s strict banking secrecy laws prevent it from commenting on claims related to individual clients.
“Credit Suisse rejects strongly accusations and inferences about the bank’s alleged business practices”, the entity said in a statement.
The entity also clarified that most of the accounts indicated in the investigation had already been closed by their owners.
“Issues uncovered by reporters are based on selective information taken out of contextwhich results in biased interpretations of the bank’s business”, assured bank sources.
The Venezuelan case
According to what was published by the media consortium, which joins the complaints made by the “Panama Papers” of 2019 and the “Pandora Papers” of 2021, Credit Suisse would have received money from clients in the period between 1940 and 2015 , which included not only mega-millionaires, but also people whose troubled backgrounds “would have been obvious just by doing a Google search.”
The report also indicates that the financial entity would not have taken into account the alerts of its own employees about “suspicious activities” in the finances of its clients, such as those of those accused of corruption around the Venezuelan state oil company.
In this specific case, the newspaper La Nación from Argentina points out that “hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the accounts of this bank at a time when the public coffers of Venezuela were being emptied.”
And adds: “The entity kept the accounts of these Venezuelan clients openeven when his involvement in corruption cases had been exposed in the media.”
According to another medium that was part of the investigation, the Venezuelan website Cocuyo Effect, known data reveals that the list includes about 20 Venezuelans linked to at least “four corruption schemes in PDVSA.”
These citizens would have consigned in 25 Credit Suisse accounts about US$273 million in assets.
One of the names mentioned in the report is the former Venezuelan deputy minister of energy Nervis Villalobos, who was accused in different judicial bodies, especially in Spain, of receiving juicy bribes between 2001 and 2006.
Villalobos is currently under arrest in Spain awaiting extradition to the US, where he faces several corruption charges against him.
On this, the website Cocuyo Effect highlights that this background did not prevent “Credit Suisse from accepting it as a client.”
Although it was reported that Villalobos’s account has already been closed, Spanish prosecutors were able to confirm that the former official “had managed to channel nearly US$25 million and some 11 million euros” towards the bank.
Another name revealed in the leak was Luis Carlos de León, former director of Finance for Electricidad de Caracas, a subsidiary of PDVSA.
De León admitted in 2018 before a US court that he had been part of a network of corruption within PDVSA and that the money would have ended up in a Swiss bank account.
According to what was revealed in the “Report on organized crime and corruption”, De León opened an account at Credit Suisse in 2011 and there he would have managed to consign assets close to US$20 million.
BBC Mundo contacted Villalobos’s lawyers, but they declined to comment on this information.
The leak also points to other former Venezuelan officials, intermediaries and businessmen who are the subject of judicial investigations.
the other revelations
Credit Suisse pointed out in response to the investigative media that it did not facilitate the corrupt activities of its clients and which has applied the most rigorous regulations against financial crimes.
“In accordance with the financial reforms of the sector and in SwitzerlandCredit Suisse has taken a number of important additional steps in the past decade, including significant investments in fighting financial crime.”
However, These revelations have given way to suspicions about the effective application of regulations against financial crimes.
According to the statements of employees of the Swiss firm to the journalists involved in the investigation, although it is true that for average accounts these rules apply, when it comes to “high net worth” clients, the bosses encouraged everyone to “look away”.
And names such as the sons of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Alaa and Gamal Mubarak, stand out. and King Abdullah II of Jordan.
The case of Swedish citizen Stefan Sederholm, who opened an account at the bank in 2008, also stands out. This programmer was implicated in a serious case of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in the Philippines and is serving a sentence in the Asian country for that.
What the report points out is that Sederholm’s account remained open and available even two years after he was convicted and his case became known around the world.
Another case that, according to the investigation, highlights the lack of rigor when analyzing the origin of the funds or the judicial records of potential clients is that of Hisham Talaat Moustafa, a wealthy Egyptian businessman who in 2009 was found guilty of the murder of Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim.
The report notes that, although Moustafa was found guilty of the crime, five years passed before his Credit Suisse account was closed.
For many analysts, the problem of banking secrecy and the limitations on sharing financial information of clients who deposit assets in Switzerland harms many other nations.
According to the Tax Justice Network, quoted by the British newspaper Guardiancountries around the world miss out on some $21 billion in taxes due to Swiss rules.
In that sense, the person who revealed the documents of Credit Suisse He said that this was one of the reasons why he had decided to “betray” the system to which he belonged.
“This system imposes a disproportionate financial and infrastructure burden on developing nations, perpetuating their exclusion from the system well into the future,” he said.
He added: “This situation allows corruption and deprives developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are therefore the ones that suffer the most from the reverse Robin Hood trick that Switzerland applies,” he noted.
Source: Eluniverso
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