Revealed: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians

The leak points to widespread failures of due diligence by Credit Suisse, despite repeated pledges over decades to weed out dubious clients and illicit funds. The Guardian is part of a consortium of media outlets given exclusive access to the data.

We can reveal how Credit Suisse repeatedly either opened or maintained bank accounts for a panoramic array of high-risk clients across the world.

One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend ¤350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal.

While some accounts in the data were open as far back as the 1940s, more than two-thirds were opened since 2000. Many of those were still open well into the last decade, and a portion remain open today.

The timing of the leak could hardly be worse for Credit Suisse, which has recently been beset by major scandals. Last month, it lost its chairman, António Horta-Osório, after he twice broke Covid-19 regulations.

That capped an unprecedented year of controversies in which the bank became embroiled in the collapse of the supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital and the US hedge fund Archegos Capital, and was fined £350m over its role in a loan scandal in Mozambique.

He has since died, but his case is one of dozens discovered by reporters appearing to show Credit Suisse opened or maintained accounts for clients who had serious convictions that might be expected to show up in due diligence checks. There are other instances in which Credit Suisse may have taken quick action after red flags emerged, but the case nonetheless shows that dubious clients have been attracted to the bank.

Relationship managers were expected to use external sources to verify customers and their risk levels, according to the leak, including news articles or databases such as the Thomson Reuters World-Check platform, which is used widely in the financial services sector to flag when people are arrested, charged, investigated or convicted of a serious crime.

After German authorities raided the Munich headquarters of Siemens in 2006, Seidel immediately confessed his role in the bribery scheme, though he said he had never stolen from the company or appropriated its slush funds. His involvement in the corruption led to his name being entered into the Thomson Reuters World-Check database in 2007.

The lawyer did not respond to repeated invitations to explain the source of the 54m CHF. Siemens said it did not know about the money and that its review of its own cashflows shed no light on the account.

In some instances, Credit Suisse is understood to have frozen accounts belonging to problematic clients. Yet questions remain about how quickly the bank moved to close them.

One client, Stefan Sederholm, a Swedish computer technician who opened an account with Credit Suisse in 2008, was able to keep it open for two-and-a-half years after his widely reported conviction for human trafficking in the Philippines, for which he was given a life sentence.

The leaked data contains an account that belonged to Helen Rivilla, an attorney convicted in 1992 for helping launder money on behalf of Ferdinand Marcos. Despite this, she was able to open a Swiss account in 2000, as was her husband, Antonio, who faced similar charges that were subsequently dropped.

It is hard to know how Credit Suisse could have missed the money-laundering case linking the couple to the corrupt Philippine leader, which was reported by the Associated Press. The couple, who could not be reached for comment, were able to hold about 8m CHF (£3.6m) with the bank before their accounts were closed in 2006.

The 2000s was also a decade in which foreign regulators and tax authorities became increasingly frustrated at their inability to penetrate the Swiss financial system. That changed in 2007, when the UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld voluntarily approached US authorities with information about how the bank was helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade tax with secret accounts.

Birkenfeld was viewed as a traitor in Switzerland, where banking whistleblowers are often held in contempt. However, a wide-ranging US Senate investigation later uncovered the aggressive tactics used by UBS and Credit Suisse, the latter of which was found to have sent bankers to high-end events to recruit clients, courted a potential customer with free gold, and in one case even delivered sensitive bank statements hidden in the pages of a Sports Illustrated magazine.

By adopting the so-called common reporting standard (CRS) for sharing tax data, Switzerland in effect agreed that its banks would in the future exchange information about their clients with tax authorities in foreign countries. They started doing so in 2018.

More than 90 countries, most of which are in the developing world, remain in the dark when their wealthy taxpayers hide their money in Swiss accounts.

The whistleblower acknowledged that the leak would contain accounts that were legitimate and declared by the client to their tax authority.

It was not possible for journalists in the Suisse secrets project to establish how many of the more than 18,000 accounts in the leak were declared to relevant tax authorities.

Media partners in the consortium wrote to more than 100 Credit Suisse clients in the data, asking whether they had disclosed their Swiss accounts to tax authorities. Five confirmed they had done so. Six said they were not required to declare their Swiss accounts. No others replied.

Banks that enable kleptocrats to launder their money are complicit in a particularly far-reaching crime. The consequences for already impoverished populations can be devastating, as state coffers are siphoned, basic standards are eroded and trust in democracy plummets.

The leaked Credit Suisse data is peppered with politicians and their allies who have been linked to corruption before, during or after they had their accounts. None are as well known as the Marcoses or the Abachas, but several wielded great power in countries from Syria to Madagascar, where they amassed personal fortunes.

They include Pavlo Lazarenko, who served a corrupt single year as prime minister of Ukraine between 1997 and 1998 before applying for an account at Credit Suisse. One month after pressure from rivals forced Lazarenko to announce his resignation, he opened his first of two Credit Suisse accounts. One was later valued at almost 8m CHF (£3.6m).

Lazarenko was later estimated by Transparency International to have looted $200m from the Ukrainian government, allegedly by threatening to harm businesses unless they paid him 50% of their profits. He pleaded guilty to money laundering in Switzerland in 2000, and was later indicted in the US for corruption and sentenced to nine years in prison in 2006 in relation to bribes received from a Ukrainian businessman.

His lawyer said those convictions did not relate to the theft of any money from the people of Ukraine. Lazarenko, who reportedly lives in California, has resisted returning to the country, where he still faces accusations he stole $17m. His lawyer said his Credit Suisse accounts had not been accessed for two decades and were frozen in connection with court proceedings against him.

It remains unclear why Credit Suisse allowed Lazarenko to open an account and deposit such huge sums in the first place, given his background; before entering politics, Lazarenko was a functionary in charge of a collective farm.

After the Arab spring uprisings their fortunes changed, and in 2015 the brothers and their father were sentenced to three years in jail by an Egyptian court for embezzlement and corruption. They say the case was politically motivated, but after an unsuccessful appeal Alaa and Gamal paid an estimated $17.6m to the Egyptian government in a settlement agreement that made no admissions of guilt.

Lawyers for the brothers reject any suggestion they were corrupt, saying their rights were violated during the Egyptian case, and 10 years of wide-ranging and intrusive investigations into their global assets by foreign authorities has not uncovered any legal violations. They added that their Swiss accounts had been frozen for over a decade, pending the resolution of investigations by the Swiss authorities.

The data reveals Credit Suisse accounts held by several more intelligence and military figures and their family members, including in Pakistan, Jordan, Yemen and Iraq. One Algerian client was Khaled Nezzar, who served as minister of defence until 1993 and participated in a coup that precipitated a brutal civil war in which the military junta he was part of was accused of disappearances, mass detentions, torture and execution of detainees.

If ordinary Algerians, Egyptians and Ukrainians have reason to complain that Credit Suisse may have aided nefarious leaders, their grievances pale in comparison with Venezuelans.

Reporters working on the Suisse secrets project identified Credit Suisse accounts linked to almost two dozen business people, officials and politicians implicated in corrupt schemes in Venezuela, most of which revolved around the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).

If so, that does not appear to have stopped Credit Suisse acquiring clients later revealed to be involved in numerous US investigations and prosecutions linked to PDVSA and the looting of the Venezuelan economy.

One case involves two US-based businessmen with Venezuelan connections, Roberto Rincón Fernández and Abraham Shiera Bastidas, who in 2009 set about bribing officials in exchange for lucrative PDVSA contracts with the help of an associate, Fernando Ardila Rueda. Among those who allegedly received bungs were the energy vice-minister, Nervis Villalobos Cárdenas, and a senior PDVSA official, Luis De Léon Perez.

In 2015, US prosecutors began indicting the participants; court papers make repeated reference to payments into accounts in an unnamed Swiss bank. However, the leaked data reveals all five men had Credit Suisse accounts active at the time of the offences. Of the five, four have pleaded guilty. The exception, Villalobos, is resisting extradition to the US from Spain.

Some of the Venezuela-linked Credit Suisse accounts contained enormous sums; Villalobos had as much as 9.5m CHF (£6.3m) in his account and De Léon had as much as 22m (£15.5m). Rincón, the businessman paying their bribes, had more than 68m CHF (£44.2m) in his account as of November 2015, the month prior to his arrest.

And there is no shortage of those. The scandals involving Greensill, Archegos and Mozambique bonds have dogged the bank over the past year.

Over the past three decades, Credit Suisse has faced at least a dozen penalties and sanctions for offences involving tax evasion, money laundering, the deliberate violation of US sanctions and frauds carried out against its own customers that span multiple decades and jurisdictions. In total, it has racked up more than $4.2bn in fines or settlements.

That includes the $2.6bn the Swiss bank agreed to pay US authorities after pleading guilty to conspiring to aid tax evasion in 2014; the $536m it was fined by the US five years before for deliberately circumventing US sanctions against countries including Iran and Sudan in 2009, and other payouts to Germany and Italy over tax evasion allegations.

Jeff Neiman, a Florida-based attorney who represents a number of Credit Suisse whistleblowers, believes the sheer number of scandals involving the bank indicates a deeper problem.

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