Talk:Credit Suisse

Monkey Business

Removed "of Monkey Business fame", this refers to the book Monkey Business : Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle by John Rolfe, Peter Troob, it may be mentioned in a separate article about "DLJ". - Jerryseinfeld 22:47, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Credit Suisse gold bullion

I know that Credit Suisse's hallmark appears on some bars of gold bullion. The article doesn't currently discuss Credit Suisse's role as a supplier of gold bullion. Anyone have some solid information? --FOo 06:20, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Credit Suisse Complicity in WWII Nazi money laundering

In 1998 after more than 50 years of denial, Credit Suisse agreed to contribute to over $1 billion in reparations to survivors or their heirs of the Holocaust. In the same year, a group of shareholders in The Credit Suisse Group sued NYC, New York State and the American federal government for allegedly lowering the value of their investments with the negative image of their company's complicity.

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'Nazi money laundering' is completely misleading - this was not money the Nazi's had stolen but rather accounts opened by people trying to hide their money from the Nazi's. Having hidden it in Swiss Accounts, and then having died in the war or the holocaust, it proved difficult for their surviving heirs to claim.

If you are looking for Nazi Money laundering - look for : - 'Francois Genoud' (Swiss Nazi Lawyer and banker - financed Nazi's in-hiding after the war, other Nazi causes and causes with Nazi-like sentiments www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/swiss-and-hitler.html )

- 'Stuart Eizenstat' (U.S. State Department - investigated what happened to gold the Nazi's looted from countries they invaded)

- 'Bergier Commission' (Swiss investigation into Nazi Gold)

But I don't know that any of that relates to Credit Suisse or banks it has absorbed over the years. The Nazi gold passed mainly through the swiss government bank and Genoud started his own bank.

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This was a 'settlement' of 1.25 Billion for a group of Swiss Banks. Credit Suisse (CS) had the largest share since it had, over the years, absorbed other banks. The accusation was that they made it very difficult or impossible for holocaust survivors to recover accounts that had been opened by relatives who died in the holocaust.

They picked swiss banks in the expectation that switzerland would retain neutrality through the war, and also because swiss banking secrecy laws let them really hide their accounts. The same secrecy laws later made it difficult or impossible to find and recover Grandpa's account if you only knew it was in some bank in Zurich. Of course the difficulty wasn't limited to holocaust victims but anyone who died during the war and lost records and paperwork.

There was also an audit led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker which had examined the secret private bank records and found 54,000 abandoned accounts from that era that likely belonged to people who died during the war. The swiss had to change some of their banking secrecy laws to even allow such an examination of records and the whole process was quite a strain in Swiss/U.S. relations.

The jewish groups which brought the lawsuits read the report as confirming that the banks had obstructed the recovery of the accounts by heirs. The Swiss Bankers Association read the report as vindicating them against much more dramatic accusations made over the years.

In the late 1990's CS was looking to expand it's operations in the U.S. and complete their merger with First Boston. Senator Alphonse D'Amato - Chairman of the Banking Comittee made this settlement a pre-condition to CS getting approval for expanded U.S. operations.

It seemed very much like extortion since there was little evidence, conflict with the swiss banking laws and the account holders were not American but long-dead europeans. But the banks paid it in one of those 'paid a bundle to settle, but denied wrongdoing' deals and left bad fealings all around that a Senator could get away with such extortion and that the banks would give in to it unless there were in fact wrongdoing.

At some point during this process, some CS employees came forward saying they had been ordered to destroy documents from the WW2 era and refused - laws required all such documents to be preserved.

As of January 2005, $219 Million had been paid to 2,800 claimants who had been linked to dormant accounts; $255 million distributed to holocaust survivers in general; $205 million to aid groups for indigent survivors and $11 million to several thousand WW2 refugees who had been denied entry to Switzerland.