Leaked data shows that, until recently, Swiss bank Credit Suisse held accounts worth more than $100 billion from sanctioned individuals and heads of state allegedly accused of money laundering.

The New York Times  reported  on February 20 that the data leak included more than 18,000 bank accounts. The data goes back to accounts that were open from the 1940s to the 2010s, but not current operations.

Account holders holding “millions of dollars in Credit Suisse” included Jordan’s King Abdullah II and former Venezuelan deputy energy minister Nervis Villalobos.

King Abdullah has been accused of  financial embezzlement  for personal gain, while Villalobos pleaded  guilty  to money laundering in 2018. Other sanctioned individuals also had accounts at Credit Suisse, as the New York Times wrote:

“Other account holders included the sons of a Pakistani intelligence chief who helped funnel billions of dollars from the United States and other countries to the (mujahideen) in Afghanistan in the 1980s.”

Banteg, the main developer of Yearn Finance ( YFI ), a leading decentralized finance (DeFi) yield farming platform, tweeted  today: “Credit Suisse’s AML happily welcomed human traffickers, assassins, and corrupt officials . ” Commentators took note of HSBC, another large international bank that has paid heavy fines for helping serious international criminals.

Credit Suisse’s AML happily welcomed human traffickers, murderers and corrupt officials.

Although there are laws that prohibit Swiss banks from accepting deposits from known criminals, the country’s notorious bank secrecy laws make it easy to evade, if enforced at all. This appears to have made Switzerland an attractive place for criminals to conduct their international banking, as the New York Times wrote:

“The leak shows that Credit Suisse opened accounts and continued to serve not only the ultra-rich, but also people whose troubled backgrounds would have been obvious to anyone looking up their names in a search engine.”

The irony of a major traditional financial institution helping big criminals was not lost on the crypto community, which has been  fighting accusations of collusion with criminals for years . The $100 billion in deposits outlined by the data breach dwarfs the $25 billion that Chainalysis estimates was  held by criminal crypto whales  in 2021.

The bank has denied any wrongdoing, but the centralized and clandestine way Credit Suisse has operated stands in stark contrast to fully transparent blockchain technology . That transparency can also mean investigators and law enforcement can keep tabs on people and governments trying to evade economic sanctions in real time.

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