What is the Suisse secrets leak and why are we publishing it?
In popular culture, there is nowhere safer to stash your cash than the vault of a Swiss bank. From thrillers to spy novels, Swiss bankers are depicted as discreet men in suits who know which questions not to ask. As James Bond quipped in The World Is Not Enough: “If you can’t trust a Swiss banker, what’s the world come to?”
Switzerland dismisses such stereotypes as lazy and outdated. But its reputation as one of the premier tax havens has not come out of nowhere. The country has nurtured, codified and even advertised the discretion of its bankers for centuries, enjoying lucrative returns as wealthy elites flocked to the Alps to stockpile their riches.
Over the past decade, however, things have started to change. When Switzerland began requiring its banks to share client data with some foreign authorities under a global exchange system to combat tax evasion in 2018, it was heralded as a watershed moment. Some even called it the end of Swiss banking secrecy.
What is the Suisse secrets leak?
Suisse secrets is a global journalistic investigation into a leak of data from the Swiss bank Credit Suisse. It comprises more than 18,000 bank accounts that were leaked to Süddeutsche Zeitung by a whistleblower who said Swiss banking secrecy laws were «immoral». The data, which is only a partial capture of the bank’s 1.5 million private banking clients, is linked to more than 30,000 Credit Suisse clients. The leak includes personal, shared and corporate bank accounts – holding, on average, 7.5m Swiss francs (CHF). Almost 200 accounts in the data are worth more than 100m CHF, and more than a dozen are valued in the billions. While some accounts in the data were open as far back as the 1940s, more than two-thirds were opened since 2000. Many
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