Credit Suisse leak raises painful questions for the bank
Credit Suisse had a message for investors during its recent earnings call. The bank was planning to change course after a tumultuous 12 months in which it was embroiled in the collapse of the US hedge fund Archegos and the supply-chain finance company Greensill Capital.
“This will not be a quick fix, and we expect 2022 will be a transition year,” the chief executive, Thomas Gottstein, said on a conference call on 10 February. “But we have made clear progress in creating the conditions for a much more stable and predictable bank.”
More “predictable”, in banking parlance, was code for reining in its riskier investment bank – which offers trading, fundraising services and deal advice to firms – and pivoting towards a more stable source of income: wealth management.
What is the Suisse secrets leak?
Suisse secrets is a global journalistic investigation into a leak of data from the Swiss bank Credit Suisse. It comprises more than 18,000 bank accounts that were leaked to Süddeutsche Zeitung by a whistleblower who said Swiss banking secrecy laws were «immoral». The data, which is only a partial capture of the bank’s 1.5 million private banking clients, is linked to more than 30,000 Credit Suisse clients. The leak includes personal, shared and corporate bank accounts – holding, on average, 7.5m Swiss francs (CHF). Almost 200 accounts in the data are worth more than 100m CHF, and more than a dozen are valued in the billions. While some accounts in the data were open as far back as the 1940s, more than two-thirds were opened since 2000. Many of those were still open well into the last decade, and a portion remain open today.
The Guardian was among more than 48 media partners around the world including journalists at Le Monde, NDR, the
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