An anonymous tip to Dutch authorities on thousands of suspicious accounts at Credit Suisse could hardly have come at a worse time for Switzerland and its banks.

Joshua Franklin reports: The information that triggered raids in five countries raises new doubts about the effectiveness of Switzerland’s efforts to shed its decades-old reputation as one of the world’s major tax havens.

“It’s a wake-up call not only for the banking community but also for authorities,” said Mark Pieth, an anti-corruption expert and criminal law professor at the University of Basel.

“Instead of really just being angry at others they should ask, have we really been zealous enough?”

Switzerland is among the countries that signed up to a global data-sharing program led by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, known as the Automatic Exchange of Information, which was designed to root out tax dodgers.

Swiss banks, having paid more than $5 billion to settle allegations of helping wealthy Americans evade taxes, have trumpeted their reformed ways, publicly encouraging clients to sign up to government programs allowing them to declare untaxed assets.

But last week’s raids of Credit Suisse’s offices in London, Paris and Amsterdam as part of a coordinated investigation in five countries show Switzerland still has a way to go to break with its past.

It is a wake-up call for financial markets as well.
“People really thought that, with the upcoming Automatic Exchange of Information and the cleanup of the European client portfolio completed, this stuff shouldn’t be an issue anymore,” Andreas Venditti, banking analyst at Vontobel, said. “Now the market seems to be confused about what to think.”

Another sign that Switzerland has to work harder to improve its reputation was the apparently deliberate efforts by Eurojust, the European Union judicial agency which helped coordinate last week’s raids, to keep Swiss prosecutors out of the loop on enforcement actions.

Switzerland’s Office of the Attorney General on Friday demanded a written explanation for the snub.

In the new investigation, raids began on Thursday in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, France and Australia, with visits also made at three of Credit Suisse’s offices. This followed a tip-off to Dutch prosecutors about 55,000 “suspect accounts”.

One of the big questions is how many of the accounts represent existing client relationships at Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second-biggest bank, and how many are legacy accounts from when Swiss banking secrecy shielded customers’ money from tax authorities.

Iqbal Khan, the head of Credit Suisse’s International Wealth Management division, said in an interview he did not know where the 55,000 figure referred to by the Dutch office for financial crimes prosecution had come from as the bank had fewer accounts than that for all of Europe.
OCCRP
Credit Suisse Taxevasion
Laundromat/ Schweiz als Drehscheibe

OCCRP

British banks handled vast sums of laundered Russian money. Billions of dollars were moved out of Russia in ‘Global Laundromat’ operation, with anonymously owned UK companies playing major role.

Britain’s high street banks processed nearly $740m from a vast money-laundering operation run by Russian criminals with links to the Russian government and the KGB, the Guardian can reveal.

HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, Barclays and Coutts are among 17 banks based in the UK, or with branches here, that are facing questions over what they knew about the international scheme and why they did not turn away suspicious money transfers…..theguardian.com

The Global Laundromat: where the money went

OCCRP/Laundromat

An Italian court sentenced on Wednesday
two generations of a Ndrangheta-linked family to a total of more than 52 years in prison for running an illegal on-line gambling empire worth over US$ 65 million.

At the end of a three year-long trial, the Bologna Court sent Nicola Femia, 56, behind bars for 26 years and 10 months for running the mafia-type gambling business. His son Nicola Rocco, 26, received a 15-year jail term, while his daughter Guendalina, 32, was handed a 10-year and three months sentence.

The family controlled poker and casino websites that were hosted in Romania and the United Kingdom but operated in Italy without national license.The groups’ counterfeit slot machines in bars and shops provided access to the virtual casinos, according to the investigators….OCCRP report

In October 2016, Andreas Frank*, an expert on money laundering, visited the Bahamas to take a look behind the scenes of the offshore world. Mr Frank was kind enough to share his field report with us, which you can scroll through below and download here.

Some introductory words on the report by Mr Frank:

“When it comes to offshore companies, the novel aspect we see here is that banks created these companies with the purpose of letting third parties use them to disguise financial transactions. The point here is that these banks do not simply facilitate tax evasion and money laundering – they actively initiate, promote and support the criminal activities of their clients.

In our case here a bank in the Bahamas established an International Business Company (IBC). The ICB’s directors were directors of a Swiss bank in Geneva, which in turn was the mother of the bank in the Bahamas.

An IBC has no employees, offices, telephones, or e-mail. An IBC has no bookkeeping nor is it required to produce an annual report, nor is it being audited. An ICB does not have to pay any taxes. With a nominal capital of below $ 50 000 only an annual government fee of $ 350 has to be paid. An IBC is not subject to any minimum capital requirements. $ 100, as in the case of Ms Kroes, suffices.

The IBC we are concerned with here, controlled by a Swiss bank, was ordered by a third party, a Swiss wealth manager from Geneva, to transfer several million euros to a Swiss fiduciary. Following the order, the Swiss bank transferred the requested amount to the account of the fiduciary. From there, the fiduciary had the money transferred, via a German bank, to a company in Cologne, Germany.”   New insights into the offshore world

*Andreas Frank:  Former banker with Goldman Sachs and HSBC,with in-depth knowledge of the financial sector. Internationally recognized independent expert in the field of Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) Currently serving as an advisor to the Bundestag and the Council of Europe.

2017-02-Report-Government-of-The-Bahamas

See also: Frauen und Kinder leiden unter Korruption/ Woher stammt das Geld?

Deutsche Bank has been fined $630m (£504m) by US and UK regulators in connection with a Russian money laundering plan. Authorities in US and UK issue fine after saying bank used offices in Moscow and London to move $10bn out of country.

Under the scheme, clients illegally moved $10bn out of Russia via shares bought and sold through the bank’s Moscow, London and New York offices.

Authorities said Deutsche had missed “numerous opportunities” to detect, investigate and stop the scheme. Deutsche Bank said it was co-operating with regulators. It also said it had put aside money to cover the cost of the settlement.

During the investigation, New York authorities and Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) found that so called “mirror” trades had been carried out through the bank between 2011 and 2015. Clients would purchase stocks in roubles in Moscow before their counterparts sold the same stock at the same price through the bank’s London branch.

The Financial Conduct Authority imposed its largest ever fine – £163m – for potential money laundering offences on Germany’s biggest bank, which it said had missed several opportunities to clamp down on the activities of its Russian operations as a result of weak systems to detect financial crime between 2012 and 2015.

The US regulator, the New York Department of Financial Services, also fined the bank $425m as it listed problems at Deutsche including one senior compliance officer stating he had to “beg, borrow, and steal” to receive appropriate resources to combat money laundering. It has imposed a monitor inside the bank for two years.

Harm Bengen
www.w-t-w.org/en/harm-bengen
www.harmbengen.de

Let’s get straight to the point: No country gets close to a perfect score in the Corruption Perceptions Index 2016.

Over two-thirds of the 176 countries and territories in this year’s index fall below the midpoint of our scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). The global average score is a paltry 43, indicating endemic corruption in a country’s public sector. Top-scoring countries (yellow in the map below) are far outnumbered by orange and red countries where citizens face the tangible impact of corruption on a daily basis.
Corruption Perceptions Index 2016

Corruption and inequality: How Populists Mislead People

Marilena Nardi
www.w-t-w.org/en/cartoon/marilena-nardi