Word: swiss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...newly surfaced details of U.S. branch accounts are a small slice of what the Swiss banks held, since they only represent funds transferred to New York City by fearful Europeans. After the war began, the U.S. Government froze the American accounts of people living in German-occupied territory in order to keep the money out of Nazi hands. The Swiss Bank Corp. list, recently declassified along with other wartime secrets, had originally been handed over to the U.S. by the bank in 1941. Similar records were submitted by the New York City offices of Credit Suisse and the Swiss-America...
...look at records in Switzerland, the joint U.S.-Swiss commission, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, is hiring several Swiss accounting firms to go into the banks and check their accounts, while preserving the secrecy the Swiss take such pride in. Though the committee's accountants have been pledged the bank's full access, it is doubtful they will come up with much. The investigators will be permitted to look only at dormant accounts, that is, those in which there has been no activity and no communication with the owners. Earlier this year the Swiss Bankers Association...
...major obstacle to finding satisfactory answers is the fact that many Jews in Germany and occupied areas were risking their life when they illegally sent their money out to Switzerland. To protect themselves they depended not only on the secrecy of numbered accounts but also on intermediaries: Swiss lawyers and accountants who opened the accounts and managed them under power of attorney. If the middlemen were honest brokers, they turned the funds over to their rightful owners after the war. If they were crooked, they embezzled the money long ago or, by making withdrawals or deposits, have fended off investigators...
...relying on newly declassified documents, Senator Alfonse D'Amato of New York has been holding public hearings and dispatching investigators to hear the stories of survivors like Estelle Sapir. Earlier this month the U.S. State Department announced a "thorough and immediate study" of what it knew about the Swiss handling of assets from Germany during and after the war. And in New York City this month, Holocaust survivors and heirs filed a $20 billion class action contending that Swiss banks improperly refused to return victims' money and other valuables on deposit. Says Swiss Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Philippe Tissieres: "This...
...spotlight has also found potentially an even darker corner of Swiss history. Last month the British Foreign Office released a 23-page report titled Nazi Gold: Information from the British Archives, which reveals that an immense amount of gold the Nazis looted from banks and private holdings in occupied countries ended up in Switzerland. Citing a Swiss banker who "let it slip," the report says some $500 million in Nazi gold was on deposit in Switzerland, a charge Bern vigorously denies. Not all of it was taken from captured central banks. Some was gold from the jewelry and teeth...