Switzerland’s two largest banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, have both been named in a wide-spread investigation by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) into offshore tax evasion.
The ICIJ said documents showed how UBS and Credit Suisse-owned Clariden Leu worked with Singapore-based Portcullis TrustNet to provide their customers with secrecy-shielded companies in the British Virgin Islands and other offshore centres.
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The ICIJ released emails where a TrustNet employee said Clariden was involved in seeking high levels of confidentiality for some clients. The TrustNet official described the bank’s request as "’the Holy Grail’ of offshore entities — a company so anonymous that police and regulators would be "met with a blank wall" if they tried to discover the owners’ identities."
PBI contacted both banks for comment, but had not received a response at the time this story was posted. Clariden reportedly declined to answer questions about its relationship with TrustNet.
In the ICIJ report a UBS spokesperson said the bank "applies the highest international standards" to fight money laundering, and that TrustNet "is one of over 800 service providers globally which UBS clients choose to work with to provide for their wealth and succession planning needs. These service providers are also used by clients of other banks."
‘Super-rich’ hide $21trn in offshore havens
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By GlobalDataA study by James Henry, former McKinsey & Co chief economist and board member of the Tax Justice Network, published last July estimated that the global super-rich have used financial service firms to exploit overseas tax laws to hide at least $21trn offshore.
The study said assets managed by the world’s 50 largest "private banks" — which often use offshore havens to serve their "high net worth" customers — grew from $5.4 trillion in 2005 to more than $12 trillion in 2010.
The estimates are significantly higher than other reports on offshore wealth. Boston Consulting Group estimated that in 2011 it totalled $7.8trn, up 2.7% from 2010.
Leak 160 times larger than Wikileaks
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), based in Washington, has obtained more than 2.5 million files detailing offshore transactions and assets held in offshore tax havens.
The hard drive, containing 260 gigabytes of the data, is around one hundred sixty times larger than the two gigabytes of US diplomatic cables made public by Wikileaks in 2010.
The names of thousands of people across the globe have been revealed and their wealth management plans disclosed.
Several high-profile politicians have been named and potentially shamed, including a dictator’s daughter and a friend of French President Francois Hollande, all escaping taxes in their own countries.
