Guilty verdict for whistle-blowing Swiss banker

A SWISS court yesterday found former banker Rudolf Elmer, who handed over secret data to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, guilty of breaching bank secrecy laws and handed down a suspended fine.

A judge said the 55-year-old former chief operating officer at private bank Julius Baer’s subsidiary in the Cayman Islands was found guilty of seeking to blackmail the bank, making threats and violating banking secrecy laws.

Elmer was acquitted by the district court in Zurich of accusations of making a bomb hoax that were levelled by the public prosecutor during the one-day trial.

Judge Sebastian Aeppli sentenced the former banker to a suspended fine of €5,500, noting that Elmer had “for years been a part of the banking world” and had “benefited” from this.

His motives in handing over a set of bank client data to website WikiLeaks in 2007 were, therefore, not to fight tax evasion, but stemmed from his dismissal from Julius Baer five years earlier, said the judge.

Elmer claimed he wanted the world to know the truth about money concealed in offshore accounts and tax evasion, as well as the systems in place to keep it secret. In court, he described the bank’s activities as “immoral, not conforming with ethics” and said they “took a criminal turn”.

He denied alleged threats, but acknowledged that he had sent data to Swiss tax authorities.

Defence lawyer Ganden Tethong Blattner told the trial yesterday that Elmer was engaged in a “David against Goliath” battle. She argued Swiss banking secrecy law was not applicable in the Cayman Islands, the Caribbean offshore banking haven where Elmer worked for the Julius Baer Banking and Trust Company.

Public prosecutor Alexandra Bergmann accused Elmer of sending an email to the bank in 2004 offering to hand over the data he held in return for €37,000.

Two days before his court appearance, Elmer handed over another two CD-ROMs of bank information to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a press conference in London on Monday, saying that the data stemmed from at least three financial institutions and covered a period from 1990 to 2009.

According to the former banker, the clients listed on the two latest discs include about 40 politicians, multinational companies and financial institutions from the United States, Europe (news) and Asia.

Bank Julius Baer has described Elmer as “disgruntled and frustrated about unfulfilled career aspirations”.