"The logical steps would be to conduct a thorough investigation, find responsibilities, and put in place measures to ensure nothing similar happens again", says Daniel Lacalle, chief economist at Tressis Gestion. "I believe that the days of lack of transparency are gone and Credit Suisse will likely strengthen its procedures to implement full compliance with the rules".
According to Lacalle, "these news are ultimately positive because they make banks strengthen their compliance and transparency processes".
German banks and, later on, also UK or US banks, may benefit from Credit Suisse's weakening, according to Sergio Rossi, professor of macroeconomics and monetary economics at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. They could "recover either German wealthy clients or several other Western high-net-worth individuals, who might be very disappointed by the recent scandals that have been affecting Credit Suisse and its reputation", the academic says.
"It could accelerate the process towards the dissolution of Credit Suisse as a global player, since it seems now that it is very unlikely for Credit Suisse to re-establish its own reputation and credibility in the fields of asset and wealth management across the globe in the next couple of years", Rossi says.
In addition, it could also be "a sign of the political riot in Germany" and possible "change of strategy as regards banking and finance in a post-pandemic world", according to the professor.
According to Euronews, Credit Suisse rejected the allegations insisting that they are "predominantly historical" and that "the accounts of these matters are based on partial, inaccurate, or selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank's business conduct". The bank stated that about 90% of accounts listed in the leak "are today closed or were in the process of closure prior to receipt of the press inquiries, of which over 60% were closed before 2015".
The logo of Swiss bank Credit Suisse is reflected in a puddle in Zurich, Switzerland February 21, 2022
© REUTERS / ARND WIEGMANN
Investigative Media Group Looking Into Leak
The data in question was anonymously given to Süddeutsche Zeitung a little more than a year ago, according to Le Monde. The original trove contained 37,000 accounts of people or companies holding over $100 billion (€88 billion). Le Monde notes that "at least eight billion is linked to clients identified as problematic".
Süddeutsche Zeitung, along with Le Monde and The Guardian, is a member of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a consortium of 47 media outlets operating in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Central America that was founded in 2007.
"OCCRP have been targeting corruption and money laundering worldwide for some time - Credit Suisse is not an isolated case", says Panicos Demetriades, professor of financial economics at the University of Leicester and former governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus. "Switzerland has traditionally been considered a safe haven for illicit money flows, but the country has been trying to clean up its act in recent years. The data leak shows that a lot of illicit money continues to flow into Swiss banks".
According to Demetriades, OCCRP – an "international organisation of investigative journalists around the world" – could benefit from these revelations as the entity "appears to be serving the public interest".
George Soros, Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations leaves after his speech entitled "How to save the European Union" as he attends the European Council On Foreign Relations Annual Council Meeting in Paris, Tuesday, May 29, 2018
© AP Photo / Francois Mori
Swiss Secrets' Targets & OCCRP's Alleged Bias
The "Swiss Secrets" leak has recently been compared to the 2021 Pandora Papers exposure by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), an independent Washington, DC-based non-profit. According to OCCRP's official website, it has long collaborated with ICIJ. Previously, the OCCRP- ICIJ joint work on the 2016 Panama Papers – a massive leak of financial documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca – won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism.
Journalists and economic observers remarked in 2021 that judging from the ICIJ charts, American politicians were notably absent from the list of individuals unmasked in the Pandora Papers. Moreover, America's wealthiest, like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett did not appear in the leak either.
Similarly, the "Swiss Secrets" leak by OCCRP has mostly targeted developing countries, including Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America, while clients domiciled in Western Europe account for only 1% of the total, according to Euronews. The OCCRP's list does not include prominent American politicians and tycoons.
The Daily Mail suggested in 2021 that the American "uber-rich" weren't mentioned in the Pandora Papers because they "have less incentive to use offshore havens due to the low tax rates they pay". However, Adriel Kasonta, a London-based foreign affairs analyst, argued on 6 October 2021 that to understand the ICIJ's "political bias", one should look at its list of donors. The non-profit donors are mostly liberal entities and foundations such as George Soros' Open Society Foundations (OSF), the Ford Foundation, the Bertha Foundation, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), etc.
For its part, OCCRP is "almost fully funded by [George] Soros, a financier with a penchant for subsidising radical causes around the world — with assistance from our own State Department", according to the Heritage Foundation's 2017 publication in The Daily Signal.
The Heritage Foundation shared three links to OCCRP's 2016 financial statements in order to "verify the degree to which this outlet is funded by Soros' Open Society Foundations, and that the State Department is also a funder". The Heritage Foundation had good reason to be up in arms about the media consortium in 2017: the said consortium funded by liberal donors launched an attack against "Republicans in Congress and conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation", after Donald Trump took occupied the Oval Office on 20 January 2017.