5 of the biggest Credit Suisse scandals

Credit Suisse is its own kind of bank. They're always on the verge of scandal and constantly having issues with compliance. One of the latest ones revolves around the bank facing a probe for telling investors to 'destroy documents' linked to Russian oligarch yacht loans. Before that, an extraordinary data leak exposed how the bank held hundreds of millions of dollars for clients involved in drug trafficking, corruption, money laundering, torture and other serious crimes. The data leak was orchestrated by a whistleblower that passed information regarding the bank accounts to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The German newspaper shared it with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project which regroups  46 other news organizations, including The New York Times, Britain’s Guardian and France’s Le Monde.

These investigations are, in fact, only the latest in a very long line of scandals, so we decided to dig into it a bit more and tell you about five of the bank’s biggest scandals over the past few decades. Trust me, you should prepare some popcorn.  

1986: Fake names for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos

Yes, you read that right. Credit Suisse apparently opened bank accounts for the Philippine president and its first lady under the fake names "Williams Saunders" and "Jane Ryan" to avoid extra scrutiny. The bank helped the presidential couple hide billions of dollars they stole from the Filipino people. I still can't wrap my head around this, especially when I think that the estimated amount of money that the couple stored in the Swiss bank is between 5 and 10 billion dollars. Nope, we’re definitely not talking about peanuts.

1999: Tokyo “shredding party"

Some employees of Credit Suisse had a "shredding party" in Tokyo and managed to lose the company's banking licence because of that. If you don't know what a shredding party is, it basically consists in gathering with a bunch of people and destroying documents that could be problematic for whatever reason. Japanese authorities fined Credit Suisse after discovering that its bankers destroyed evidence related to an investigation into whether it was supporting companies to cover their losses. Since then, the bank got its licence back, and the employees got fired.

2000: Sani Abacha

Sani Abacha, the Nigerian military leader stole millions and millions of dollars from his own country and people. And guess where did he stash all his funds? I'm sure you already got it. The Swiss Federal Banking Commission charged Credit Suisse for accepting about $214 million-worth of funds linked to corruption by the Nigerian military dictator in the 1990s. Apparently, no one in the bank knew that his two sons were people with political connections.

2004: Yakuza

We're back in Japan. It is 2004, and a former Credit Suisse banker gets arrested for allegedly assisting an international money-laundering ring. The banker was said to have laundered ¥4.6 billion ($42.2 million) collected from loan sharks by buying discount bonds and cashing them through a Japanese securities firm. He later got acquitted as he was unaware of the source of the funds. Naughty, naughty Yakuza. 

2019: Bulgarian cocaine

It seems that Credit Suisse has severe problems in understanding who its customers really are. Swiss prosecutors issued an indictment against Credit Suisse for failing to run appropriate checks on its clients and investigate the source of funds linked to a Bulgarian drug ring. Apparently, the bank laundered at least $146 million through accounts between 2004 and 2008. This case is massive, and the official criminal trial started not so long ago, in February 2022: it's the first one against a Swiss bank in the country's history. 

To this list, we can add tax evasion in multiple countries, bankers forging clients' signatures to divert money and make stock bets without their knowledge, corruption schemes in Hong Kong, corporate espionage scandals and much more.

This series of scandals even pushed the European People's Party (EPP), the largest political grouping of the European parliament, to call for the EU to review its relationship with Switzerland and consider whether it should be added to its list of countries associated with a high risk of financial crime.

Not everybody likes banks, but they are almost indispensable in the system we’re living in. We need them to keep our money safe, invest it, and lend us money, so it's not easy to imagine a world without them. Over the years, many laws passed to protect us and help banks be as transparent as possible, but still, as it's evident in a case like the Credit Suisse one, sometimes that's not enough. It’s easy to see how anyone would raise an eyebrow while listening to the never-ending lists of controversies and scandals that the bank has been involved with. Is this what the modern world needed to change the banking system? I guess the only thing we can do is wait and see.