Credit Suisse leak alleges Swiss bank stashed billions in illicit funds
euronews.comCredit Suisse was accused by an international investigation carried out by several media of hosting funds of criminal or illicit origin.
The Swiss bank said it “strongly rejects the allegations and insinuations about the bank’s purported business practices.”
The investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a consortium of 47 media including France's Le Monde, Britain's The Guardian, the US' Miami Herald, and Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung, is based on data from more than 18,000 bank accounts hosted since the early 1940s and until the late 2010s.
The data, given anonymously to Süddeutsche Zeitung a little over a year ago, concern accounts belonging to 37,000 people or companies, for a total amount of more than $100 billion (€88 billion), "of which at least eight billion are linked to clients identified as problematic," Le Monde said.
Süddeutsche Zeitung said the data points to the bank having accepted “corrupt autocrats, suspected war criminals and human traffickers, drug dealers and other criminals” as customers.
Credit Suisse said the allegations are “predominantly historical” and that “the accounts of these matters are based on partial, inaccurate, or selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank’s business conduct.”
The bank said it had reviewed a large number of accounts potentially associated with the allegations, and about 90% of them “are today closed or were in the process of closure prior to receipt of the press inquiries, of which over 60% were closed before 2015.”
As for accounts that remain active, the bank said it is “comfortable that appropriate due diligence, reviews and other control related steps were taken in line with our
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