Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians
theguardian.com> This article is a bit difficult to understand; there's a mixture of actual money laundering with the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account". There's a difficult and IMO increasingly urgent question here, of whether the banking system is a utility or something else. There's no whistleblowers from the electricity company, even though it literally kept the lights on for murderers and traffickers. Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life". If a criminal hasn't had their whole wealth confiscated as proceeds of crime by the courts, is the convention now that nonetheless they should be deprived of the ability to use them? Maybe. I really don't know the answer in some hard cases. But it feels like if the banking system is going to be part of the law enforcement system, that needs to be established through actual laws passed through the parliament. As far as I can see there are some charges of actual complicity in the article, but it's hard to separate them from "this bad person was a client". https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/149544584780670566...
Whilst I agree with everything you say (quote?), you’re not meant to bank with unexplained or unsavoury sources of funds. Eg storing money you stole from your murdered is not better than money laundering. Iirc some of the CS clients fell into this category and the bank was very keen to not ask questions.
I’m pretty sure there is a bank somewhere in the Alps where Kim Jong Un has a little bank account under an appropriately obfuscated identity. Probably more than one. Whoever opened it from the bank’s side probably knew something is up but chose not to ask questions. And they are providing banking access to North Korea’s dictator.
> Whilst I agree with everything you say (quote?), you’re not meant to bank with unexplained[1] or unsavoury sources of funds.
Guilty until proven innocent is the legal basis for civil forfeiture too. So by supporting both depriving people of access to banking and criminalizing usage of cash you can fully drive them out of society.
[1] This is the guilty until proven innocent bit
This is a bit different. It sounds like with US civil forfeiture you can just seize any and all assets merely because someone is accused of something unrelated. This I agree is awful.
Bank KYC is a bit different. A bank, certainly at this level, is supposed to know who you are and where your money is coming from ahead of setting up the account. They have to satisfy themselves it’s a legal source. If they become suspicious, they should tip off authorities who can investigate etc.
At no point here can the bank judiciously freeze your assets. All this should mostly happen before the bank even touches your money.
Actually, if you're on the OFAC list, many banks eill open sn account for you, and happily take deposits. They just will not let you withdraw. So Your claim that a bank cannot judiciously freeze your assets is a bit off.
And for the record, nanes going on the OFAC have blast radius. If the U.S. finds out terrorist X has an alias of Temperence Prudence, the other Temperence Prudence's out there can expect some disruption while compliance department's try to figure out if you're a terrorist or not. All without breathing a word of it to the customer.
I know, because I ended up having to troubleshoot that system. It is quite horrifying, and to say the least duplicitous.
It’s not judicious of the banks to freeze assets, it’s set by government agencies. Banks just follow the rules.
I can well imagine the implementation of such rules is done badly, especially in US, but that’s a bit different to this sub thread I think.
Yes but a bank is supposed to do this because a law that was written to force them to do it.
There is not reason other than that, and it's circular logic to sidestep due process to point to the law that says that they have to do it as the reason they have to do it.
A bank is not legally required to refuse your money until you can prove you haven’t stolen it. A bank maintains very specific set of government mandated processes where if think something is suspicions they report it to the authorities.
Note the difference (1) if you deposit $50 the bank by default assumes you didn’t just murder someone and take their money, this is true even if you served a sentence for that crime and (2) the bank defers to the government on what to do, they’re not expected to run a parallel justice system figuring out who’s worthy for a bank account
They absolutely do have a parallel justice system of who gets to bank, and it's called OFAC, and the international sanction list.
Neither is ram by banks, they are the recipients of regulation there, not creators.
I am starting to believe now that you are deliberately misrepresenting the truth.
This has zero, nothing at all, to do with "guilty until proven innocent". Anonymous banking is simply not allowed anymore, because of literally trillions of dollars in crime money going through Switzerland. Now you are legally required to know your customer, even in Switzerland.
Forcing banks and customers to obey financial disclosure laws and punishing them if they break the law is how the law works.
If you or I walked into a bank with tens of millions of dollars in cash, we would be asked to show ID, and information about the deposit would be sent to the government because it's the law.
It strikes me that you just don't like the law and instead of saying that, you move the goalposts and pretend the law itself doesn't exist.
You're right, these are separate issues. What you're describing is really just money laundering, which is already illegal and there a number of dimensions available for this to be discovered and prosecuted under the law. What the person you are replying to is concerned about - and rightfully so[1] - is that zealous enforcement of banking controls, even though it comes from the same principled place of "dictators shouldn't be allowed to hide their funds in country_that_has_laws", can and probably will result in banks making decisions about who has access to banking services based on internal political dynamics. It's a huge elephant in the room that I think deserves more discussion and scrutiny.
[1] https://twitter.com/OttawaPolice/status/1495367658132361216
Why post a link to an Ottawa Police tweet about looking for people actively involved in the civil unrest there? If there was an organized conspiracy by right-wing US crisis actors to create chaos and bring downtown Ottawa to a stop, is it overzealous for the police to look into it and any possible crimes committed?
To quote the tweet explicitly: "If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges." [emphasis added]
Protest.
Even the police are telling on themselves here. What's great about the tweet is that the verbiage is context-independent. You can apply that to anything. Imagine a tweet from e.g. the Portland Police Bureau saying this about protests in Downtown Portland - protests which often devolved into violence and actual damage to businesses, something which hasn't happened at all in Ottawa.
So to answer your question, it's an example of where if you are protesting for the "wrong" thing, your finances are now threatened. Are people actually okay with this?
No, the Canadian officials are saying that if you took financial support to participate in a crime, they are going to confiscate that money.
And that's a damned good thing.
>>Are people actually okay with this?
Well I guess we have one person who actually is okay with this.
Like I said farther up thread, the next frontier of this debate really is going to be about if we will "allow" people with the "wrong" politics access to the banking systems we all depend on for our livelihood.
So protesting is a crime now?
> Whilst I agree with everything you say (quote?), you’re not meant to bank with unexplained or unsavoury sources of funds.
Who's "you"? The Bank? How does the bank "decide" whether the funds are legitimate or not? Be the judge, the executor and everything else in between?
Am I crazy or this shit~ should have never been acceptable, in a sane world.
~: KYC/AML and what else.
The bank, or any financial institution receiving deposits from random people, has to ask itself: is it likely that this person disposes of such money legally. If yes, accept them as a client, if not, refuse and alert authorities.
Anyone can dispose of £50 or even £5000. If your bank sees a £2k salary come in every month, they won’t be surprised that suddenly you have £50k in your account.
If you knock on their door and say, I’m a lowly administrator in a country in the bottom decile of human development index, can you look after my $100m, the should definitely dig deeper. In such case, yes you should actually document where the money is coming from.
It shouldn’t be such a high burden of proof. Money doesn’t spontaneously appear like particle-antiparticle pairs. Maybe you sold something, or were paid for some services. You should be able to demonstrate that with ease.
Remember, the bank, other things being equal, wants your custom. So they’ll apply the lowest bar possible to make sure the money isn’t stolen, lest the regulators slap them hard.
With CS the issue was, they basically didn’t even do the bare minimum with any degree of honesty and integrity.
You write a lot without addressing my point, basically disregarding it: The point is the bank having deliberation when it comes to making a decision about the source or legitimacy of the money.
This is the job of a judge within a court where the defendant can argue otherwise (to the legitimacy of his money). Period.
Any other system (KYC/AML) should have been anti-constitutional, especially today when most transactions require a bank account. If KYC/AML is required, it should be done by the state (or the local government) itself and let the bank be, you know, a bank.
It basically is how you say it should be, with the pre-sorting distributed to the leaves of the tree (banks and funds).
When a client approaches you, broadly, you have to sort them into low risk, medium risk and high risk.
Low risk you waive through.
Medium risk you do some digging on but if you’re then happy, you continue.
High risk, you alert the authorities. Then they take care of this. You put the client on hold. The authorities may later give you a formal go-ahead. At least this is how AML works in Europe, I’m less familiar with US.
So if the institution is concerned enough to refuse services, they absolutely must alert financial supervisors too, and it’s up to them how to proceed. They give you the go-ahead or the red light.
Strictly speaking you could still refuse a client then, eg if you think they could be on a sanction list soon enough, but that’s business reasons, not supervisory.
It’s probably no longer useful to think about the state as an entity that cares about things like constitutional rights, or even as a separate “body” like the government, legislature or police. Banks regulate so much of ordinary peoples lives. You say “most transactions require a bank account.” Not to mention the fed/central banking. Banks ARE the state. So I am not surprised if they are given the right or responsibility to KYC
False dichotomy. You're not crazy for having those principles. But you're thinking in terms of "little people" justice.
Came here to post dsquared's comment. Compare and contrast this thread with the truckers one. We don't really want to force banks into some kind of ill-specified "account cancellation culture".
Actually, to a certain extent, yes, the electricity company is going to report you if you're using too much electricity (this is how pot growers used to be caught), and yes, preventing traffickers from using legitimate banking is absolutely a standard practice, this is literally why money laundering is a thing. Also, if you are stupid enough to get caught money laundering (people will proposition strangers/(young stupid people) and say "cash this money, I'll give you 10%") you'll be blacklisted pretty damn quick - literally penniless teenagers give away their entire future to these scams.
back before legalized grow operations:
https://www.postandcourier.com/news/marijuana-bust-shines-li...
> the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account"
> Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life".
You make some thought-provoking points. Over the past decade I've noticed a creeping erosion of the fundamental liberal tenet "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" in the courts of public opinion and media assumption.
> This article is a bit difficult to understand;
Perhaps better not to comment then, because it seems like you didn't actually understand it.
> with the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account"
Right off the bat, you are misrepresenting the legal issues involved, which were explained in the article.
The issue in each case was that a really bad person had a secret bank account with a huge amount of money which they could never have acquired legally.
For generations, Swiss banks allowed this, and of course every dictator, embezzler and money launderer took advantage of this.
But finally Switzerland legally prevented this - except Credit Suisse decided not to follow the laws.
IF you are going to continue with this, please familiarize yourself with the relevant laws, starting perhaps here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
> There's no whistleblowers from the electricity company, even though it literally kept the lights on for murderers and traffickers
To play devil's advocate here, if those people completed their sentence and they are being resocialized they have access to what any regular citizen is supposed to access.
OTOH if they haven't been sentenced yet and the electricity company knows of it, I think they are walking on thin ice if they don't report it. I'm sure there are heavy sentences for keeping a blind eye on trafficking.
The other point worth mentioning when money laundering happens, tax evasion or even misappropriation of state money the bank is facilitating those crimes which really stands by itself.
So now I'm really wondering what the legit use case of the anonymous accounts is supposed to be.
> OTOH if they haven't been sentenced yet and the electricity company knows of it, I think they are walking on thin ice if they don't report it.
In what country is "no electricity" (part of) the sentence for murderers? And even in a country where "no electricity" is (part of) the sentence for murder, shouldn't the electric company only impose it in response to a court order?
More to the point, if they haven't been sentenced, why is the electric company imposing a sentence?
Along the same lines, if they haven't been convinced, why is the electric company treating them differently?
You are conflating two different aspects. Almost anyone can be a bank's client, nobody is questioning their right to bank.
The bank not questioning the source of the money they deposit is the problem here. That looks like an intentional institutional gap designed to enable money laundering and tax evasion.
Vladmir Putin is free to open an personal account in any bank. However if he is depositing millions and billions and the bank is not questioning the source it has failed its responsibilities .
> The bank not questioning the source of the money they deposit is the problem here
How do you know that the bank isn’t questioning the source of money?
In my experience these fancier banks tend to ask a whole lot of questions.
> Vladmir Putin is free to open an personal account in any bank. However if he is depositing millions and billions and the bank is not questioning the source it has failed its responsibilities .
Vladimir Putin could also have come up with paperwork showing that he got this money legally. If there are no obvious issues with the documentation provided, it’s simply not the banks problem.
> How do you know that the bank isn’t questioning the source of money?
How do you know they do ? The recent leaks, U.S. government position on Swiss banking laws and money laundering tells me they don't question too hard.
> In my experience these fancier banks tend to ask a whole lot of questions.
Are you High Net Worth Individual with 100's of millions of dollars in shady assets from a developing economy ? Otherwise your experience doesn't compare.
> Vladimir Putin could also have come up with paperwork
Vladimir Putin or any government official do not show the same sources of income and wealth in their home countries, if the income/ wealth declarations don't match to the money deposited the due diligence process is clearly not working.
Everybody likes defending the bank's right to bank with murderers, but god forbid they bank with a cam sex worker.
https://bitcoinist.com/allie-rae-onlyfans-x-crypto-crossover...
Murderers don't disproportionately trigger chargebacks. We've had this discussion a lot in the past few years [0].
is there any actual data about that or is it urban myth?
Onlyfans keeps identity documents for its members so trafficking-wise they are actually safer than facebook. there are all other businesses affected by the same discrimination, e.g. sex toy shops, dating websites, nudist websites, basically anything that shows skin. I find it hard to believe that chargebacks are so much of an issue, especially since there are third parties willing to take the risk for a high fee (CCbill).
Money, liquidity, and fungibility is a public good, it has been (and still is) a waste of public and private resources to attempt to alter that reality.
Although this isn't a popular or public opinion by the public or banks or politicians, it is also the reality for banks and their host governments, and all lip service otherwise is either a lie for data collection or simply fails spectacularly at actually preventing any flow of funds.
So, there isn't any point in saying "Credit Suisse is a rouge bank", because the whole idea of pretending to whitelist transactions and clients is flawed and useless. There isn't any point in saying "privacy laws are immoral" because it doesn't matter what anyone's background is, they can still access banking and pools of liquidity to move between assets and trade with others anyway.
Even the vague idea of avoiding terrorist financing is flawed. Terrorism isn't expensive enough for this whitelisting project. People aren't flying planes into buildings because they don't want to fly planes into buildings. Its not that expensive. Let's drop the charade and reduce overhead costs for everyone.
Congratulations, we've successfully stigmatized having money, except for the people that actually have it who ignored the cultural stigma and can afford better education and counsel on reality. Let's move on from this data mining and transaction whitelisting project.
> it doesn't matter what anyone's background is, they can still access banking and pools of liquidity to move between assets and trade with others anyway.
Julian Assange & Wikleaks had no access to the banking system because a US politician asked the banks to refuse them service at a time when they had not been charged with any crime.
Whenever you see someone you "dislike" being dealt with in an extradjudicial manner just keep in mind that these are your rights that now don't matter.
Right, correct, it should be illegal for the government to attempt leveraging financial intermediaries this way, even for people we don't like. Just like we don't cut the power off for people we don't like.
I'm convinced there's always going to be some new frontier for regulators to say "if we could just get rid of this, there'd be no more crime."
80s/90s: offshore banks, bearer shares
00s: MSBs/money orders/check cashers
10s: prepaid/gift cards, crypto, luxury real estate
Truth is that as long as you can triple your money bringing cocaine from Mexico to Texas people are gonna do it. If anything they've made it harder to track because instead of criminal proceeds just being deposited in a Miami bank account they're being used to buy cell phones for export to Colombia.
and crypto brings back bearer shares on steroids
not regarding anonymity but in fungibility and capital formation, selling and trading the shares is on another level
I believe KYC is a very good idea fundamentally, and I wish more banks took it seriously with their top customers as well (or more) as with the rest. It’s not in banks’ interests, of course.
And I disagree that terrorism is cheap. Preparation for 9/11 allegedly cost up to $500K. Bojinka plot used fair amount of financing as well. Maybe those couldn’t be caught via financial controls and KYC, or maybe they could.
Correct, I consider that cheap when HSBC subsequently laundered billions of dollars over the following decade after the PATRIOT Act. The same PATRIOT Act that wouldnt have flagged wire transfers the terrorists used even if it existed before 9/11. It's just an opportunistic data collection program on everyone else.
With billions slipping through from any random branch manager at any bank anywhere, how many 9/11s is that? Any time, for any reason, funding secured.
I can't help but see KYC as a means for automated IRS cases. They are swamped and the basic associations from the new datasets are incredibly revealing.
That's because Congress and the Senate out of pure self interest have chosen to restrict the IRS funding for decades. If they had the balls to increase funding I have little doubt they would have found and retrieved taxes rightfully due to the government.
Expenses are interesting and add up rapidly (as any business owner knows)... 500k over two years for 20 people is only $1000/person/month and that has to account for all living expenses plus whatever else is required (flight training, cover identities, bribes, pay-for-play etc.)
Yes, of course the parent did not specify what they thought as “cheap”, I am only pointing out that it is apparently not as cheap as a couple of airplane tickets.
In other words, their point was that all you need is a desire to fly an airplane into a building, but my point is that you need that plus XXX kilodollars (spread over time or not). Reportedly, one of the 9/11 guys was wired $100k in one go[0]—these amounts could be noticed, but dealing with very profitable accounts one might just be too greedy for that.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Septe...
But it's not like they put "explosives and other ordinances" in the subject line. For all the bank knew Atta was just some flight school student. If banks were to require justification for every wire transfer, legitimate commerce (also remittances and a bunch of other things) would grind to a halt.
Also, there are lots of wealthy Saudis all over and 100k probably doesn't even register as a "large" payment in those circles.
KYC done properly means the bank understands every customer. What you do in life, what you get normally paid for, etc.
Problem is, it’s tricky to do at scale and the banks want to profit more, so it makes financial sense for them to err on the side of caution with small accounts that are possibly net loss anyway (considering maintenance overhead, etc.) but starting with a certain level of wealth I think they are more than willing to not care.
This whistleblower is taking substantial personal risk. The Swiss banking secrecy laws provide for 5 year prison terms for people leaking client-sensitive information and when I worked on sensitive things in Switzerland I had to sign a document setting out the penalties and saying that I understood that I was personally liable and could (and probably would) receive jail time for disclosing anything.
Considering the profile of the people exposed, shouldn't they be more concerned for their lives than prison?
Yes. It the reversal of this scene here from Morgan Freeman in Batman: https://youtu.be/1z6o1GIEsQE?t=50
I hope we soon can get proper whistleblower law because right now companies get away with way too much crap.
At least the state can use anything leaked no matter how it was obtained against the banks and companies.
My feeling is Switzerland shouldn't be allowed to do that much banking.
The whistleblower could just as easily be an employee of the Russian ФСБ or the US NSA as an employee of Credit Suisse, in which case they wouldn't be at much personal risk.
I'm honestly always amazed at people in these threads who say "Oh, well in general this is a public good, so we should be hands off". Sure, the default should be hands off, but if you have enough information to know what youre doing is wrong, you are responsible. It's one thing to say it's a public service, but if you know what you're doing is wrong, you know it's wrong,and in a lot of cases, a lot of effort is put into pretending that you don't know it's wrong even though you know it's wrong.
At the point where your own employees are risking their careers because they know it's wrong. Well... maybe only poor people have moral compasses.
I commend the bravery of the leaker/whistleblower and hope they can maintain their personal safety. It's time to expose the evil amongst the elite--all the elite--once and for all.
Should it be limited to just elite or everyone all the way down? Not trolling you as it might sound but how do you draw lines between elite and not elite.
The elite seem to be able to scale the harm they do pretty well. I wouldn't be against focusing more resources on pursuing elite bad actors, but don't think there should be a minimum bad bar that must be surpassed to get prosecuted.
It’s a good perspective on the multiplier aspect. I presume it goes both ways. Elite can do great things at scale but also exhibit a level of harm that is well beyond a linear comparative. Thx for the thought.
Well elite in financial sense since we talk about banks, doing unlawful financial operations. Its not a bank's role to investigate murders.
Poor can't do that much impactful financial crime, can they
Once again the leaker went to Süddeutsche Zeitung [1] and left his/her/their documents there. Panama papers [2] and Paradise papers [3] started there as well. I'm really wondering why that is.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers
Well, by now they have a reputation: Leakers of high-profile cases can stay anonymous if they go to this newspaper.
The accounts (and who they belong to) can be explored on this site: https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en...
It's this sort of thing that gives me (even more) confidence that pretty much every government conspiracy or at least the more incredulous claims (eg aliens and UFOs) are false. Such systems would rely on humans and humans tend to be really bad at keeping secrets or they simply have a crisis of conscience and release things they technically shouldn't as is the case here.
Look at the Manhattan project. utmost secrecy. Attempts to segregate the workers in towns to limit contact with potential spies. Yet people felt ideologically the US should not have a monopoly on such a weapon so leaked it to th Soviets anyway.
Go back to antiquity and you have Julius Caesar who held ultimate power in Rome and had loyal legions and immense wealth. And he was undone by a handful of principled people with knives.
I actually think this is why things are never as bad as they seem and conversely never as good as they seem.
This leak, the Panama papers, the Paradise papers and so on. I applaud whoever is in a position to leak this information and does so at great personal risk.
...Never before have I expected to hear anyone calling the person who proliferated nuclear secrets "principled".
Differences of opinion aside, you severely underestimate the character/circumstances/motives/number of "conscientious objectors" in society.
People on HN often dismiss the "nothing to hide" argument as invalid when it comes to strong privacy rights, but... the fact remains that those who very much want to hide their illegal activities and ill-gotten gains are first in line to the banks/services with the strongest privacy guarantees (swiss banks, cryptocurrencies, e2e chat apps, etc).
It's a hard problem and I don't think saying "oh well, having human traffickers and terrorists use the service to enable their activities is just the cost of privacy rights" is going to fly any more than "oh well, having tons of criminals use guns for murder is just the cost of the second amendment" flies. The latter argument used to fly, but it's increasingly unpopular to say that these days, and I suspect the same will happen when it comes to services with strong privacy guarantees.
> ... are first in line to the banks/services with the strongest privacy guarantees (swiss banks, cryptocurrencies, e2e chat apps, etc).
I'm not sure why crypto got bundled in there because it's anything but private. The entire transaction history is public. That's kind of the point. Look at tainted Bitcoins [1] and the couple caught trying to launder the Bitfinex Bitcoins [2].
Crypto is not private by design.
[1]: https://cipherblade.com/blog/tainted-bitcoin-isnt-what-you-t...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/nyregion/bitcoin-bitfinex...
> Crypto is not private by design.
Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency:
> I'm not sure why crypto got bundled in there because it's anything but private
It's pseudonymous, which is similar to private. As long as you don't allow your pseudonym (wallet id) tied to your real identity, you can do all sorts of naughty stuff and get away with it.
The worst apples will always find a way to protect their privacy, while the innocent majority of people is having their privacy invaded against their best interests.
Do you use HTTPS? SSH? A password manager?
Everyone has something to hide -- it is a matter of how much and from who(m). In our world of Big Data/surveillance capitalism, I don't see how you could even argue against stronger privacy rights...
I have SSH on my servers for the same reason I have locks on my house. Not because I have stuff to hide, but because having stuff stolen costs me money, and SSH and locks are an inexpensive way of preventing stuff of mine from being stolen
Sounds an awful lot like privacy:
1. the state of being apart from other people or concealed from their view; solitude; seclusion
2. the state of being free from unwanted or undue intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs; freedom to be let alone
I don't draw a distinction between "your house" and "your data." Whatever your rational for having those barriers - that's your decision, right? Just because other people enjoy living on communes doesn't make it any less absurd for a country to outlaw locks on doors (or e2e chat apps...). Taken even further, people tend to do horrific things (sexual &/or domestic abuse) behind locked doors. But plenty of other people, like you & me, tend to sleep better behind them.
Democratic Switzerland should at least force its bank to only make business with customers from democratic countries. By doing that they would avoid a huge number of highly problematic customers. So basically only make business with countries which have a score of 6.0 or higher in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Components
Doing so would require a vote from all the Swiss (as any real democracy would require), and a successful vote would block them from doing business with customers from almost all other countries (as they wouldn’t qualify as real democracies by Swiss standards).
I’m not sure how such a referendum would be written, but surely it wouldn’t pass (Swiss are fairly conservative in regards to money and business).
I didn't say they should restrict business to countries most similar to Switzerland. There are 75 countries on the democracy index that are called democratic. I believe doing business with 75 countries should be more than enough for small Switzerland. This would free Switzerland from the accusation of hypocrisy, because at the moment it is democratic itself, but profiting a lot from money coming from authoritarian, corrupt regimes and even outright dictatorships.
P.S.: Actually the restriction of business to the 75 democratic countries in the world should be the rule in every democratic country, because it would show that democratic values are more important than money.
> This would free Switzerland from the accusation of hypocrisy, because at the moment it is democratic itself, but profiting a lot from money coming from authoritarian, corrupt regimes and even outright dictatorships.
How is a democracy index put out by an organization legally binding? You are still asking to encode a qualitative judgement into law, which is difficult even in less democratic countries.
> because it would show that democratic values are more important than money.
For most people, democracy is the means to safety and security (and yes, money), not the other way around. Your plan would ironically make more sense in an autocracy where such ideology can be more easily implemented and enforced.
> You are still asking to encode a qualitative judgement into law, which is difficult even in less democratic countries.
I disagree. In pandemic times every democratic country had a list of safe and not-safe countries regarding traveling restrictions. I demand something similar for business restrictions.
> Your plan would ironically make more sense in an autocracy where such ideology can be more easily implemented and enforced.
Laws can better be enforced in Democracies, because usually laws are created so that they reflect the majority opinion and there is less corruption.
Another day, another answer to "what is Bitcoin good for?"
Earlier today we were discussing the false-positive rate of Google Drive's copyright-scanning approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404587. What do you suppose the leaker's false-positive rate on "fraudsters and corrupt politicians" is?
The article does admit this:
> It is not illegal to have a Swiss account and the leak also contained data of legitimate clients who had done nothing wrong.
Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system?
The sole exception seems to be "an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal," which is to say, the accountholder may turn out to be innocent. This suggests that the whistleblower's false-positive rate was upwards of 99%.
So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative.
Not a hosted wallet like Coinbase or Binance, though. They're probably almost as vulnerable as Credit Suisse.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375671
> Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system?
No, but extra due diligence is required when someone convicted of taking bribes or similar corruption or drug/human trafficking record opens a bank account with huge sums of money.
Or people like those:
* former head of intelligence and vice president of Egypt https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en...
* https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en... former wife of the current Kazakh dictator
Just to name a few. Their money is quite probably of dubious origin and the bank should have done better due diligence.
There's nothing in the article to suggest that they didn't do the due diligence; do you have access to some information about that that isn't in the article?
The whole article is about Credit Suisse's lack of due diligence, and the reason why the whistleblower blew the whistle. I find it impossible to believe that the former wife of an extremely corrupt politician in a kleptocracy just stumbled upon one million CHF in a casino.
That's what makes it so telling that the article contains no information whatsoever about what due diligence was or wasn't done and, with the exception of the unnamed cardinal, no suggestion that the accounts were used for any wrongdoing.
As for Nadezhda Tokayeva, who I think is who you are talking about, how much money do you think she should have? For 40 years she was married to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the most powerful man in Kazakhstan. Her maximum balance was 1.5 million CHF, barely enough to buy a house in San Francisco. That amounts to a savings rate of 40,000 CHF per year during that time, or 80,000 CHF per year during the 21 years after he first became Prime Minister. That hardly screams "looting the country"; even the president of the US gets paid several times that much officially, without even taking into account speaking engagements and the like.
Kazakhstan is indeed very corrupt, but what do you want banks to do about it? Refuse to service any Kazakh customers? Only service Kazakh customers who operate private businesses rather than working for the government—on the dubious theory that private Kazakh businesses are not corrupt?
This just sounds way too much like "you don't look like the kind of person who deserves that much money" to me.
> So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative.
But with Bitcoin all transactions are public, journalists don't need a leak.
Transactions, yes, and dates and amounts, but not names. And many "transactions" on the blockchain are within a single wallet.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when journalists start reporting on the immense data in the blockchain, but for whatever reason it hasn't happened yet. I don't think it'll happen as long as the "journalists" are the kind that think it's okay to publish an encryption key to a publicly available encrypted file of confidential data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...
This times 1000 if you have done things wrong and don't want journalists (or law enforcement) to find out
Or if you've done things right that you don't want law enforcement to find out about, such as funding a protest.
But this is all hypothetical; evidently only one of the 30,000 people swept up in this dragnet had done anything with their account that would merit such attention: the single example of the (oddly, unnamed) cardinal with his possibly fraudulent London real estate transaction.
I understand the need for privacy and exclusive access, but would love some kind of anonymized stats per country, year etc..
Switzerland is all about Neutrality
What's the point of neutrality if you are gonna ignore it when it's convenient.
There's a reason Switzerland held Jewish and Nazi gold alike.
This country should be heavily sanctioned by the international community. They actively pull in (tax) fraudsters and criminals.
So, like Delaware?
just like: bigger half of Caribbean, City of London, all of the UK Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Malta, Cyprus, Macao, Singapore, Delaware (yes that's US) and many, many more.
Its a dumb approach, sold by populist politicians to less-than-bright voters before elections who want binary world and simple solutions to all their problems.
Bank secrecy and shadow banking should not exist.
The worst thing about capitalism and globalism is tax dodging and bank secrecy.
Oof. Some incredibly problematic stuff in this article:
> Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Guardian seems to be proposing that people with (certain?) criminal convictions should not be allowed to have bank accounts.
Is there any other way to interpret this?
covid ends. russia war begins. putin to discuss ceasfire. credit suisse expose.
is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously.
> is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously.
While I don't know about the rest, Russia has been a neocon project for a long time. If Trump hadn't given them the shock of their lives by winning and then spent the next four years sucking all the oxygen out of Washington, Hillary would have granted their wish in 2017-18.
Putin is no saint. But I think he is vastly superior to his drunkard predecessor who let the country be looted by oligarchs.
It is also possible that this is a Wag the Dog situation.[1]
Putin is smart as hell, most probably sociopath on top. You don't get to be long term successful KGB apparatchik for nothing. The problem is, nobody who wants all that juicy freedom, democracy and other perks of good western life wants strong Russia, these things are exact opposites. Its by far the biggest actual threat to European democracy.
I come from country who was invaded by them in 1968 when we showed we may head towards democracy, and the Russian mentality remained the same since then.
Its sad germans as a nation are still heavily traumatized by what their ancestors did during WWII, and probably hell will freeze sooner than german army fighting, well anything. This leaves Europe severely weakened in eyes of nearby machos like Putin or Erdogan.
He could have built a fine prosperous empire that people are actually happy to live in. Instead, everything is worse and he just siphons tens of billions to same banks as discussed here via his buddies (UBS cough cough). It may be the Wag the Dog situation, but all above is still valid.
Inflation is too high currently (no surprise), so they need something to distract the masses with
So they can spend a warping 770 Billion a year on defense. How do you even sell that with so many people struggling in the US?
Being a cynic I would say you don't sell it (except maybe with the Russian situation) but just do it. Who should stop the US government from going forward with this?
I know, I am a cynic. But I once was (young and naive) a member of the German social democrat party. I visited the state convention for their youth members. It was a perfect politics simulacrum. With decisions being made, backroom deals (because we don't like the other people - even if their proposal was factually good). And so on.
The perfect training ground for young party "soldiers" streamlined to not show any sigh of a consciousness towards real problems. Just play the power game. Show how scrupulous you are without being obvious.
I left this rotten club behind (politics) and never looked back. Nowadays 20 years later the people back thrn being good at this game and aiming for the top posts in this youth org of the SPD sit at the center of power in Berlin in relevant positions.
Yes it's discusting how modern politics operate not in the interest of the population but in their own and their enablers (donors and powerful).
The most obsurd is when soldiers are sent to fire weapons where each bullet costs more than they make in a year at another group of people that have even less for political reasons.
My SO always quotes (we both don't know the origin of the quote):
"In war people who don't know each other kill each other on command of people who know each other but don't kill each other."
because the bulk of that 770 Billion is payroll, military spending is a jobs program.
We spend triple that on the social programs.
If you’re paying so much, why does it work so poorly, compared to Europe?
Because US political structures are designed in a way that discourages competence. We spend an insane amount on social services but nobody cares if they work, spend wisely or have an impact.
It works better than Europe.