Credit Suisse has hosted for several decades tens of billions of euros of funds of criminal or illicit origin, says an international investigation carried out by several media and released on Sunday, accusations that the Swiss financial institution firmly rejects.
The investigation was conducted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a consortium of 47 media including Le Monde, The Guardian, the Miami Herald, Nacion, following a major leak of data submitted anonymously to a little over a year ago to the German daily Sddeutsche 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.
Based on a massive leak of information from thousands of bank accounts administered by Credit Suisse, (the investigation) shows that in defiance of the rules of vigilance imposed on large international banks, the establishment, based in Zurich, hosted funds linked to crime and corruption for several decades, writes the newspaper.
In a press release, Credit Suisse reacted to these accusations, saying that the data studied are partial, inaccurate, or taken out of context, resulting in a biased presentation of the conduct of business by the bank.
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90% of the accounts concerned are now closed, including more than 60% before 2015, assures the bank, which also specifies that it will investigate 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 and customers domiciled in Western Europe represent only 1% of the total, the newspaper said.
Credit Suisse, number two in the Swiss banking sector, has been rocked by a series of scandals over the past year. In March, the bank was shattered by the bankruptcy of the financial company Greensill, in which some 10 billion dollars had been committed through four funds, then by the implosion of the American fund Archegos which cost some 5 billion dollars the Bank.