Look, there's been *another* massive banking leak, this one from Credit Suisse, showing complicity in laundering money for the world's greatest monsters: human traffickers, despots, criminals. They're calling it Suisse Secrets.
They had to call it that, because Swiss Leaks was already taken, for the 2015 UBS leaks that revealed UBS's complicity in the same fucking thing.
1/
As Jeffrey Neiman - lawyer for the Credit Suisse whistleblowers - told the *Guardian*, "How many rogue bankers do you need to have before you start having a rogue bank?" I'd add, given that this rot extends beyond Credit Suisse to UBS and undoubtably further, "How many rogue bankes do you need to have before you start having a rogue banking system?"
2/
The friend who emailed me about this wrote, "After so many of these, I am accepting that these leaks don't matter, and that those in power don't actually want to fix the system. Sunlight isn't doing any disinfecting at all."
He's not wrong, but that's not the whole story.
The problem isn't the *transparency*, it's the *inaction*.
3/
They money laundering revealed in Suisse Secrets abetted the worst criminals on Earth, like Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, who looted $5b from his people and laundered hundreds of millions (or more) through Credit Suisse. Abacha is in good company - CS also laundered for the Marcoses and their bagman, and other looters from Syria to Madagascar.
4/
Also mafiosi, killers, human traffickers, embezzlers, fraudsters, corrupters and worse. The facts laid out in the Guardian story (and stories in partner outlets like *Süddeutsche Zeitung*), there is no question that Credit Suisse knew whose money they were handling, and knew just how dirty it was.
What's more, the reporting makes it abundantly clear that Swiss banking secrecy is designed and maintained for the express purpose of laundering this blood money.
5/
@pluralistic isn't laundering of blood money and by "third-world" strongmen a secondary problem, if at all? plenty of western companies and "first-world" strongmen make their respective billions of blood money legally in military contracts and "industrialization" and "reconstruction" (a.k.a nature's disfiguration) in conflict zones the world over.
"banking secrecy" is just one of the methods of the exploiters' madness.
