The calculus was simple and Swiss: discretion as a banking product. What shattered it, in February 2015, was the publication of Swiss Leaks, nearly 60,000 leaked files detailing accounts at HSBC’s Geneva private bank for more than 100,000 clients and some 20,000 offshore companies. Investigators counted 180.6 billion euros moving through those accounts between late 2006 and early 2007 alone. The press called it “the biggest leak in Swiss banking history”. The source was Hervé Falciani, a bank software engineer who walked out with the files, was detained by Swiss authorities in December 2008, was released “overnight”, and surfaced in France, where he handed the data to Paris.
Strategically, the files mapped an clientele no compliance department would claim. The bank’s Geneva arm served figures already named by the United Nations and the courts in arms trafficking, blood diamonds and bribery, and circles close to Hosni Mubarak, Ben Ali and Bashar al-Assad. Among the individual names: Rami Makhlouf, cousin of the Syrian ruler; a company listed by the UN as a “possible provider of weapons” in Liberia’s civil war; the diamond trader Erez Daleyot; Jeffrey Tesler of the $182-million Halliburton bribery affair; and Vladimir Antonov, accused of looting 400 million pounds from Lithuania’s Snoras bank. Staff had discussed holding accounts in offshore names to sidestep the European Savings Directive of 2005.
The broader stakes landed on governments. The data was parsed by 154 journalists across 47 outlets, with Switzerland, France and Britain leading both tables, $31.2 billion, $29.5 billion and $21.7 billion respectively, and Swiss, French and British clients the most numerous. Morocco counted $1.6 billion hidden, some of it traced to the royal family, including $9.1 million attributed to King Mohammed VI. In France the heiress Arlette Ricci was convicted within months, sentenced to three years, two suspended, fined a million euros for a “particularly determined willingness” to shelter some 18 million euros, with dozens more cases queued behind hers. Days before her trial, prosecutors charged the bank itself.
What this signals about enforcement is sober reading. HSBC paid 300 million euros, about $352 million, in 2017 to avoid a French trial, a first under Paris’s new negotiated-fine procedure, and the case against the parent was dropped. Washington later collected a $192 million penalty for helping Americans evade taxes, and a former HSBC Swiss banker pleaded guilty in the $1.8 billion French case. The tally for most named clients was lighter, a sore point critics still press.
The bank fought the coverage as hard as the courts; The Guardian reported its advertising had been put “on pause”, and a Telegraph commentator resigned over spiked stories. Falciani remains what ICIJ’s own headline asked, “Whistleblower? Thief? Hero?” But Switzerland’s 2022 move to track corporate ownership concedes the point: secrecy stopped being an asset the day the files moved.
