Credit Suisse offices tax raids

Credit Suisse, some of its employees and hundreds of account holders are the subjects of a major tax evasion and money laundering probe that spans five countries. Investigators in the Netherlands arrested two individuals earlier this week, seizing a gold bar, paintings, jewellery and bank account information.

They allegedly concealed millions of euro from authorities by placing them in Swiss bank accounts, the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service said in a statement yesterday. Criminal investigations are also under way in Australia, Germany, the UK and France.

Credit Suisse said its offices in London, Paris and Amsterdam were searched on Thursday by authorities in connection with client tax matters. The UK tax authority is investigating “senior employees” at a global financial institution, it said.

Australia’s Serious Financial Crime Taskforce said that it had identified 346 of its citizens “with links to Swiss banking relationship managers alleged to have actively promoted and facilitated tax evasion schemes.”

Credit Suisse is co-operating with the authorities, the bank said in a statement from Zurich. The bank said it has “implemented Dutch and French voluntary tax disclosure programmes and exited non-compliant clients,” and has applied a withholding tax agreement with the UK since 2013.

The bank has been hit hard in the past over tax evasion allegations. Credit Suisse was fined $2.6bn (€2.4bn) in the US in 2014 and pleaded guilty to helping Americans evade taxes. The bank paid a €150m fine in Germany in 2011 to end court proceedings over allegations it helped clients evade taxes.

The raids were done without informing authorities in Switzerland, the attorney general’s office in that country said in a statement. The Swiss aren’t conducting a criminal probe into the matter, a spokeswoman said.

“The sheer volume of data and its international scope makes this an exceptional case,” said Thierry Boitelle, a lawyer with Bonnard Lawson in Geneva.

The investigations come as Credit Suisse begins implementing a new global standard for the automated exchange of information for its European locations.

About 100 countries, or jurisdictions, including Switzerland, have agreed to collect data from banks to share annually with other tax authorities, making it harder for tax dodgers and money launderers to hide money with private banks.

Bloomberg