'Secretive' Credit Suisse Accepted Clients Including Fraudsters, Corrupt Politicians, and Drug Traffickers

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] Credit Suisse, which has served as a vault for the world's wealthy and maintained a policy of 'secrecy,' has been revealed to have managed funds for individuals worldwide involved in various crimes such as fraud, corruption, drug trafficking, human rights violations, and dictatorship for decades. An insider whistleblower leaked customer lists and details, pointing out the immorality of the Swiss bank.

On the 20th (local time), Germany's S?ddeutsche Zeitung reported, citing an anonymous whistleblower, that it had obtained a list of about 30,000 Credit Suisse clients. Following the initial report, the newspaper shared the data with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which involved 46 media outlets worldwide, including The Guardian, The New York Times (NYT), and Le Monde, to jointly analyze the information.

The data includes some customer information Credit Suisse received from the 1940s through the 2010s. Foreign media reported that this includes a Filipino human trafficker, the chairman of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange who was imprisoned for corruption, a billionaire who ordered the murder of a Lebanese singer's girlfriend, corrupt politicians from Egypt and Ukraine, and the head of Yemen's intelligence agency who committed torture.

Credit Suisse stated, "Most of the issues raised date back to the 1940s, and these accounts represent partial, inaccurate, and contextually incomplete selected information, which can lead to extreme interpretations of the bank's operations."

However, The Guardian reported, "Although some accounts date back to the 1940s, more than two-thirds of the accounts were opened after 2000, and some of these accounts are still active." It added that the funds in these accounts exceed 100 billion Swiss francs (approximately 130 trillion KRW). The whistleblower who exposed this data criticized, "Swiss banking laws are immoral," and said, "The excuse of protecting financial privacy is merely a cover to conceal the shameful acts of Swiss banks as accomplices in tax evasion."

Credit Suisse is the second-largest bank in Switzerland after UBS and is known globally for maintaining secrecy. The bank has long faced accusations of aiding money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption crimes.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.