An international investigation conducted by several media, published on Sunday February 20, affirms that the Crédit Suisse banking group has hosted tens of billions of euros in funds of criminal or illicit origin for several decades. The Swiss financial institution “strongly rejects” these accusations.
The survey was conducted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a consortium of 47 media including The world, The Guardian, the Miami Herald, the Nationfollowing a major data leak submitted anonymously a little over a year ago to the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung.
These data concern more than 18,000 bank accounts hosted at Credit Suisse between the beginning of the 1940s and the end of the 2010s and belonging to 37,000 people or companies, specifies the daily. Le Monde (subscribers). “Based on a massive leak of information from thousands of bank accounts administered by Credit Suisse, [l’enquête] shows that in defiance of the rules of vigilance imposed on large international banks, the establishment, born in Zurich, has hosted funds linked to crime and corruption for several decades”advances the newspaper.
Credit Suisse said that the data studied is “partial, inaccurate, or taken out of context, resulting in misrepresentation of business conduct” by the bank. “90% of the accounts concerned are now closed, including more than 60% before 2015”assures the bank in a press release, which also specifies “lead the investigation” regarding the data leak.
In total, more than 100 billion Swiss francs (more than 95 billion euros) are involved in the accounts studied by the consortium. The leaks mainly focus on developing countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America. Customers domiciled in Western Europe represent only 1% of the total, the newspaper specifies.