Word: swiss
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With secrecy came abuse. The Swiss themselves were so startled by revelations in 1977 about rogue activities at the Chiasso branch of Credit Suisse?whose managers allegedly funneled funds through an offshore trustee company, hiding losses from their supervisors?that a new age of tougher bank regulation was ushered in. First came due-diligence rules that compelled banks to identify all their clients and establish the beneficial owners of assets. For over two decades now, banks have been obliged to keep a copy of some official identification of a client, like a passport?a measure that U.S. banks are only...
...fall of Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt former President of the Philippines, led to the first major break with the secrecy tradition. Under enormous worldwide pressure, the Swiss in 1986 froze accounts belonging to Marcos, and later transferred more than $600 million into an escrow account in Manila. The case marked the start of Swiss cooperation in international criminal cases and the advent of tough laws against money laundering. Any suspicions of money laundering must now be reported to a central monitoring agency in Bern. Strict rules hold senior bank managers accountable for the accounts of politicians, whatever country they come...
...recent cases the laws brought striking results. Banking regulators publicly reprimanded several Swiss banks?by name?for keeping accounts belonging to relatives of the former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. And it was the Swiss in the autumn of 2000 who tipped off Peru that Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres, the former head of Peruvian intelligence, had stashed away about $114 million in five Swiss accounts. Judicial authorities in Zurich blocked the accounts after the banks themselves reported their suspicions. The Swiss ambassador in Lima then informed the Peruvian government and urged it to open an international criminal investigation, with which Switzerland...
...havens within the E.U. Germany in the 1990s saw how damaging capital flight could be when it instituted a special withholding tax on savings to pay for reunification, sparking an exodus of billions of marks to neighboring Luxembourg. Tax evasion is not a criminal offense in Switzerland, and the Swiss say they have good systems for preventing it at home: they levy a hefty 35% withholding tax on dividend and interest income for their own citizens...
Along Zurich?s Bahnhofstrasse, home to the nation?s biggest banks and priciest jewelers, nerves are fraying. These are tough times for the Swiss financial services sector, which accounts for more than 10% of the nation?s gross domestic product and approximately 6% of jobs. The long slide of world stock markets is taking its toll on profitability and forcing bankers to work particularly hard to calm their well-heeled clients. Swiss banks have also borne the brunt of a successful tax amnesty mounted earlier this year by Giulio Tremonti, Italy?s Finance Minister. Italians repatriated assets valued...