THE SWISS WASH WHITER - PART ONE --- Non, Alors, Sacré Bleu, Not Credit Suisse!!!

(c) Jeffrey Robinson 2023

How could Credit Suisse be in trouble?

There must be something wrong, here. Headlines this week insist that the Swiss treasury has had to bail out the bank to the tune of $54 billion. Seriously? I mean, with all the money that bank has laundered for decades, hasn't someone been smart enough to stash a little bit away for a snowy day?

This can't be the bank's fault. Swiss bankers have been telling me for decades how wonderful they are.

Secret Swiss banking is not the root cause of any problem anywhere. We obey the rules. We don't aid and abet tax evasion. We don't hide money for despots and dictators. We don't cavort with drug traffickers. We respect the statutes put in place to define Politically Exposed Persons. We don't launder anyone's money. There is no gambling in Casablanca!

So what's gone wrong? The answer is obvious.

The rest of the world is out of step with the Swiss.

It's just that simple. The real culprits are all those angry foreigners who have been so unkind as to say nasty things about this bank and other Swiss banks, plus all those anti-Credit Suisse folk around the world who have levied massive fines against the bank over the past 20 years.

Yeah, let's blame them.

Last year, Credit Suisse Chairman António Horta-Osório resigned because he’d been caught breaking Covid quarantine rules in Switzerland and the UK. He went to a soccer game and some tennis matches and he shouldn't have. He decided that the ensuing outcry hampered his ability to properly represent the bank, so he owned up to the offense then did the nobel thing. He fell on his sword. Granted, it was a swifter solution than ten days on Paxlovid.

As for his timing... well... give the guy a break. After all, it was clearly nothing more than a coincidence that five weeks after he walked away, the bank was named as a serious culprit with the publication of the Suisse secrets leak.

According to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, some 30,000 Credit Suisse clients were holding a total of $108 billion in secret nominee accounts.

Among the bank's clients were the King and Queen of Jordan; blacklisted Eastern European businessmen and several political leaders, including the disgraced former Ukranian prime minister and convicted criminal Pavlov Lazarenko, the former first lady of Kazakhstan Nadezhda Tokayeva, and Azerbaijani strongman Vasif Talibov; at least five Pakistani political and senior military figures, including the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee; several members of the Marcos family alive and dead in the Philippines; several family members, associates and political allies of the ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, including his former head of the General Intelligence Directorate; politicians and senior government officials from Syria, Jordan, Algeria, Venezuela, Tajikistan, Armenia, Angola and Taiwan, including at least one known international fugitive. Then there was the Serbian drug lord Rodoljub Radulovi? and a man named Antonio Velardo, a known money launderer for two families of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta.

Add to that list one billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend, a group of bigshots in Venezuela who helped themselves to funds owned by Venezuela's state oil company, and someone in the Vatican (no, definitely not the Pope) who controlled an account with around $315 million that was used in a property scam in London.

Hey, don't make that face and say, "All those sleazebags? WTF!" Come on, is it really our problem?

No! Not according to the official reaction from Credit Suisse: "The accounts of these matters are based on partial, selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank’s business conduct.”

There you have it. That's it. Nothing to see here. Keep walking. I mean, come on, our ancestors gave the world, chocolate. (Actually, it was the Spanish, but stop being so pedantic about it.) Get over it. The world is simply out of step with Credit Suisse.

The bank even said as much when they labeled the leaks, “A coup against the Swiss banking industry."

Right on cue, the bleachers filled with Swiss bankers and their molls stood up and yelled, "Banquiers 1, Sceptiques 0!"

A month later, it came out that Credit Suisse officials had been asked by certain Russian oligarchs - who'd been counting on their Swiss bankers to continue hiding their assets - to destroy all the documents on file linked to yacht loans.

Come on, those guys would ask that, wouldn't they!

The year before, Credit Suisse was fined ￡350 million for its role in a loan bribery affair known, intriguingly, as the "Mozambique Tuna Bonds" scandal. Apparently the bank stood accused of having its fingers in a $50 million-pie of kickbacks that a contractor handed over, hoping the bank would arrange more favorable terms for nearly $1.3 billion-worth of loans.

At the same time, Credit Suisse somehow - inadvertently, bien s?r - found itself enmeshed in the collapse of a supply-chain lender whose loans, totaling around $10 billion, had been sold by the bank to its clients.

Eh alors, what goes up, must come down.

Then there was the Archegos Capital Management hedge fund collapse.

Not our fault for writing off $5.5 billion of risky exposure .

Another pesky little matter arose in 2020 when Swiss prosecutors indicted Credit Suisse for failing to run proper checks on several of its clients who just happened to have been linked to a Bulgarian cocaine ring. The claim was that some $146 million had been moved through Credit Suisse between 2004-2008.

The fine came in at $22 million.

It wasn't us, it was some stupid employee who should have known better.

The fine remained $22 million.

The year before that, Credit Suisse found itself forced by the nasty Americans to pay up $47 million for having spent the years 2007-2012 trying to win over a business deal by offering bribes to family and friends of Chinese officials.

Give me a break, we all know that doing business in China is not like doing buisiness in Gstaad.

That was the same year a former Credit Suisse banker named Patrice Lescaudron was sentenced to five years for forging a clients’ signatures, running up $150 million in losses on stock bets.

Not us. It was him.

In 2017, Credit Suisse seemed surprised to be implicated in the UK, Germany and Australia after tax authorities raided homes and offices of tax evaders in Holland and France, revealing chicanery in a reported 55,000 accounts.

Can't trust foreigners!

As if that wasn’t unfair enough, the financial regulator in Singapore - encore des étrangers! - sent Credit Suisse a bill for $700,000, claiming the bank had breached various money-laundering rules in transactions linked the $4.5 billion corruption scandal that was the Malaysian investment fund 1MDB.

Life for the bank was even more frustrating the year before that, when the Americans?levied a fine of $16.5 million for “significant deficiencies” when it came to its anti-money-laundering program.

If Americans want to evade taxes, some tried to argue, why should that be our problem?

Quickly, the Italians follow suit, extracting a $130 million settlement from Credit Suisse for, allegedly, helping clients to hide funds and dodge taxes. They claimed the bank’s scheme included a complex insurance scheme involving CS subsidiaries in Bermuda and Liechtenstein.

All they were doing was what the Americans did, so blame the people in Bermuda and Liechtenstein.

Two years before that, Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to helping Americans evade taxes. The offenses supposedly had taken place over several decades. The US Senate held hearings and revealed that Credit Suisse had courted at least one potential high-income customer with free gold. The bank also delivered statements hidden inside Sports Illustrated magazine.

Blame the Senators!

And two years before that, in 2012, four former Credit Suisse bankers were charged by the US for fraudulently overstating the value of $3 billion worth of sub-prime bonds.

Everybody was doing that!

In 2011, the Germans had their say about Credit Suisse induced tax evasion, and the bank agreed to pay €150 million to settle that matter.

Blame the Germans.

Two years before that, the problem wasn’t tax evasion, it was sanctions' evasion. The Americans levied a $536 million fine for circumventing sanctions against Iran and Sudan over a twelve year period, 1995-2007.

Come on, we're famous for being neutral. It's who Swiss banks are and what all Swiss banks do. We hid Jewish money from the Nazis and Nazi money from everybody else. Why is Credit Suisse suddenly the bad guy?

Not to be outdone, in 2004 the Japanese arrested a Credit Suisse banker claiming he’d been laundering $300 million for a major Yakuza gang.

Stop. The banker was acquitted!

True, but the stain on the bank's affairs in Japan remained. A stain that dwarfed by comparison with the irreparable destruction of the bank’s reputation when it was revealed that Credit Suisse had hidden $214m million linked to Nigerian military dictator Sani Abacha in the 1990s.

According to several sources that monitor these things, Credit Suisse has been fined 52 times through the end of 2022.

Those include $175.8 million for offenses under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, $536 million for economic sanction violations, nearly $1.4 billion for investor protection abuses, $2.5 billion for tax violations and nearly $6.4 billion for toxic securities abuses. The total comes to a shade under $11.5 billion.

No biggie, it's just the cost of doing business. What, FedEx delivery guys never get parking tickets?

*****

Next Week, Part Deux - It's not that the world is out of step with just Credit Suisse, the world is out of step with the entire Swiss banking industry. I know that for a fact because they told me.

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