The strongest currency in the world? The Swiss franc reigns as 'most expensive' - according to the Big Mac index Big Mac index tests the relative price of currencies around the world Swiss franc remains the most expensive, according to the index The iconic burger now costs the equivalent of $6.35 there, £5.20 in sterling Norway's currency is the second most expensive, followed by Sweden's
Mena: I think the reason the small landlock European country of Switzerland have the strongest currency in the world is because Switzerland have the oldest, stable and secretive banking system in the World created by the Knight Templars in the Middle Age. Switzerland is also the birthplace of the Habsburgh royal family of Europe.
Switzerland is also a neutral country that never get involve in wars. Switzerland was neutral during World War 1 and World War 2 and both opposite sides of the wars deposit their money in Switzerland.
If I have a currency portfolio I will put 50% of my money in Swiss Franc and the rest in USA Dollar, British Pond and Australian Dollar. I will also put some of my money in secret Swiss bank account.
Switzerland in Europe
Switzerland
Swiss Franc
Swiss Franc
UBS symbol Hermes Greek God of commerce and three keys.
UBS three keys symbol
Savour every bite: Switzerland has retained its position as one of the most expensive spots in the world to buy a Big Mac - the McDonald's burger will set you back £5.20 ($6.35)
The Big Mac index was created by The Economist in 1986 as a way of comparing the relative values of different currencies
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UBS Zurich Bank with black and white duality tiles.
UBS investment room
Investment floor
UBS Bank HQ
Credit Swiss Bank with the kind of Knight Templar reverse red cross flag
Credit Swiss HQ
Credit Swiss clock or calendar
UBS AG is a Swiss global financial services company, incorporated in the Canton of Zurich,[3] and co-headquartered in Zürich and Basel.[4] The company provides wealth management, asset management, and investment banking services for private, corporate, and institutional clients worldwide, and is generally considered to be a bulge bracket bank. In Switzerland, these services are also offered to retail clients.[5] The name UBS was originally an abbreviation for the Union Bank of Switzerland, but it ceased to be a representational abbreviation after the bank's merger with Swiss Bank Corporation in 1998.[6] The company traces its origins to 1856, when the earliest of its predecessor banks was founded.[6] UBS has over CHF 2.2 trillion in invested assets,[7] and remains a leading provider of retail banking and commercial banking services in Switzerland. Its assets under management (AuM) amounted in 2014 to US$1,966.9 billion, representing a 15.4% increase in AuM compared to the equivalent data of 2013.[8] It is the biggest bank in Switzerland, operating in more than 50 countries with about 60,000 employees around the world, as of 2014.[9]
In comparison to other European banks, UBS suffered among the largest losses during the subprime mortgage crisis, and it was required to raise large amounts of outside capital. The bank received a US$9.7 billion capital injection in 2007 from the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (currently GIC Private Limited effective from July 2013), which remains one of the bank's largest shareholders.[10] UBS also received capital from the Swiss government, further complemented by a series of equity offerings in 2007, 2008, and 2009
Credit Suisse Group is a Swiss multinational financial services holding company, headquartered in Zürich, that operates the Credit Suisse Bank and other financial services investments. The company is organized as a stock corporation with four divisions: Investment Banking, Private Banking, Asset Management, and a Shared Services Group that provides marketing and support to the other three divisions.
Credit Suisse was founded by Alfred Escher in 1856 under the name Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (SKA, English: Swiss Credit Institution) in order to fund the development of Switzerland's rail system. It issued loans that helped create Switzerland's electrical grid and the European rail system. It also helped develop the country's currency system and funded entrepreneurship. In the 1900s Credit Suisse began shifting to retail banking in response to the elevation of the middle-class and the growing popularity of savings accounts. Credit Suisse partnered with First Boston in 1978. After a large failed loan put First Boston under financial stress, Credit Suisse bought a controlling share of the bank in 1988. In the 1990s, Credit Suisse acquired the Winterthur Group, Swiss Volksbank, Swiss American Securities Inc. (SASI) and Bank Leu among others. In the year 2000, it added the U.S. investment firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.
The company restructured itself in 2002, 2004 and 2006. It was one of the least affected banks during the global financial crisis, but afterwards began shrinking its investment business, executing layoffs and cutting costs. During the period between 2008 and 2012, Germany, Brazil, and the United States began a series of investigations into the use of Credit Suisse accounts for tax evasion. In May 2014, the company pleaded guilty to decades of conspiring to help US citizens avoid taxes, and agreed to pay $2.6 billion in fines.[4][5]
In 2014, Credit Suisse had 888.2 USD Bn of assets under management (AuD) according to the Scorpio Partnership (an increase of 9.5% on 2013).[
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Pope Cement looks like a Black man in that photo. The document suggests that Pope Clement V, depicted above in a painting, did not think the Knights were guilty of heresy, but felt pressure from
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (Latin: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici), commonly known as the Knights Templar, the Order of the Temple (French: Ordre du Temple or Templiers) or simply as Templars, were among the most famous of the Western Christian military orders. The organization existed for approximately two centuries in the Middle Ages.
Officially endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church around 1129, the Order became a favored charity throughout Christendom, and grew rapidly in membership and power. Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles with a red cross, were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. Non-combatant members of the Order managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom, innovating financial techniques that were an early form of banking, and building many fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land.
The Templars' existence was tied closely to the Crusades; when the Holy Land was lost, support for the Order faded. Rumors about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created mistrust, and King Philip IV of France, deeply in debt to the Order, took advantage of the situation. In 1307, many of the Order's members in France were arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and then burned at the stake. Under pressure from King Philip, Pope Clement V disbanded the Order in 1312. The abrupt disappearance of a major part of the European infrastructure gave rise to speculation and legends, which have kept the "Templar" name alive into the modern day.
Seal of the Knights Templar
The Master of the Knights Templar's great seal was double-sided and showed the picture of The Dome of the Rock (some opinions are that the picture represents a circular dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) on one side and the Order's symbol of two knights on one horse on the other side. There was also a smaller, single-sided seal, which showed the Dome of the Rock (or the circular dome of the Holy Sepulchre). Every Grand Master seal shares distinctive characteristics. In order to avoid misuse, special measures were taken regarding the seals. They were kept in a locked compartment which required three keys to open. The Grand Master himself kept one of these keys, and two of his high officials held the others. The forgery of the seals was a very difficult process because each seal was unique and hand made.
Organization
The Templars were organized as a monastic order similar to Bernard's Cistercian Order, which was considered the first effective international organisation in Europe. The organizational structure had a strong chain of authority. Each country with a major Templar presence (France, England, Aragon, Portugal, Poitou, Apulia, Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, Anjou, Hungary, and Croatia) had a Master of the Order for the Templars in that region. All of them were subject to the Grand Master, appointed for life, who oversaw both the Order's military efforts in the East and their financial holdings in the West. No precise numbers exist, but it is estimated that at the Order's peak there were between 15,000 and 20,000 Templars, of whom about a tenth were actual knights.
It was Bernard de Clairvaux and founder Hugues de Payens who devised the specific code of behavior for the Templar Order, known to modern historians as the Latin Rule. Its 72 clauses defined the ideal behavior for the Knights, such as the types of garments they were to wear and how many horses they could have. Knights were to take their meals in silence, eat meat no more than three times per week, and not have physical contact of any kind with women, even members of their own family.
A Master of the Order was assigned "4 horses, and one chaplain-brother and one clerk with three horses, and one sergeant brother with two horses, and one gentleman valet to carry his shield and lance, with one horse." As the Order grew, more guidelines were added, and the original list of 72 clauses was expanded to several hundred in its final form.
There was a threefold division of the ranks of the Templars: the aristocratic knights, the lower-born sergeants, and the clergy. Knights were required to be of knightly descent and to wear white mantles. They were equipped as heavy cavalry, with three or four horses and one or two squires. Squires were generally not members of the Order but were instead outsiders who were hired for a set period of time. Beneath the knights in the Order and drawn from lower social strata were the sergeants. They were either equipped as light cavalry with a single horse or served in other ways such as administering the property of the Order or performing menial tasks and trades. Chaplains, constituting a third Templar class, were ordained priests who saw to the Templars' spiritual needs.
The knights wore a white surcoat with a red cross and a white mantle; the sergeants wore a black tunic with a red cross on front and back and a black or brown mantle. The white mantle was assigned to the Templars at the Council of Troyes in 1129, and the cross was most probably added to their robes at the launch of the Second Crusade in 1147, when Pope Eugenius III, King Louis VII of France, and many other notables attended a meeting of the French Templars at their headquarters near Paris. According to their Rule, the knights were to wear the white mantle at all times, even being forbidden to eat or drink unless they were wearing it.
Initiation, known as Reception (receptio) into the Order, was a profound commitment and involved a solemn ceremony. Outsiders were discouraged from attending the ceremony, which aroused the suspicions of medieval inquisitors during the later trials.
New members had to willingly sign over all of their wealth and goods to the Order and take vows of poverty, chastity, piety, and obedience. Most brothers joined for life, although some were allowed to join for a set period. Sometimes a married man was allowed to join if he had his wife's permission, but he was not allowed to wear the white mantle.
The red cross that the Templars wore on their robes was a symbol of martyrdom, and to die in combat was considered a great honor that assured a place in heaven. There was a cardinal rule that the warriors of the Order should never surrender unless the Templar flag had fallen, and even then they were first to try to regroup with another of the Christian orders, such as that of the Hospitallers.
Only after all flags had fallen were they allowed to leave the battlefield. This uncompromising principle, along with their reputation for courage, excellent training, and heavy armament, made the Templars one of the most feared combat forces in medieval times.
History
After the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099, many Christian pilgrims traveled to visit what they referred to as the Holy Places. However, though the city of Jerusalem was under relatively secure control, the rest of the Outremer was not. Bandits abounded, and pilgrims were routinely slaughtered, sometimes by the hundreds, as they attempted to make the journey from the coastline at Jaffa into the Holy Land.
Around 1119, two veterans of the First Crusade, the French knight Hugues de Payens and his relative Godfrey de Saint-Omer, proposed the creation of a monastic order for the protection of these pilgrims. King Baldwin II of Jerusalem agreed to their request, and gave them space for a headquarters on the Temple Mount, in the captured Al Aqsa Mosque. The Temple Mount had a mystique, because it was above what was believed to be the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The Crusaders therefore referred to the Al Aqsa Mosque as Solomon's Temple, and it was from this location that the Order took the name of Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or "Templar" knights. The Order, with about nine knights, had few financial resources and relied on donations to survive. Their emblem was of two knights riding on a single horse, emphasizing the Order's poverty.
The Templars' impoverished status did not last long. They had a powerful advocate in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a leading Church figure and a nephew of AndrŽ de Montbard. He spoke and wrote persuasively on their behalf, and in 1129 at the Council of Troyes, the Order was officially endorsed by the Church. With this formal blessing, the Templars became a favored charity throughout Christendom, receiving money, land, businesses, and noble-born sons from families who were eager to help with the fight in the Holy Land. Another major benefit came in 1139, when Pope Innocent II's papal bull Omne Datum Optimum exempted the Order from obedience to local laws. This ruling meant that the Templars could pass freely through all borders, were not required to pay any taxes, and were exempt from all authority except that of the Pope.
With its clear mission and ample resources, the Order grew rapidly. Templars were often the advance force in key battles of the Crusades, as the heavily armoured knights on their warhorses would set out to charge at the enemy, in an attempt to break opposition lines. One of their most famous victories was in 1177 during the Battle of Montgisard, where some 500 Templar knights helped to defeat Saladin's army of more than 26,000 soldiers.
Although the primary mission of the Order was military, relatively few members were combatants. The others acted in support positions to assist the knights and to manage the financial infrastructure. The Templar Order, though its members were sworn to individual poverty, was given control of wealth beyond direct donations. A nobleman who was interested in participating in the Crusades might place all his assets under Templar management while he was away.
Accumulating wealth in this manner throughout Christendom and the Outremer, the Order in 1150 began generating letters of credit for pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land: pilgrims deposited their valuables with a local Templar preceptory before embarking, received a document indicating the value of their deposit, then used that document upon arrival in the Holy Land to retrieve their funds. This innovative arrangement was an early form of banking, and may have been the first formal system to support the use of cheques; it improved the safety of pilgrims by making them less attractive targets for thieves, and also contributed to the Templar coffers.
Based on this mix of donations and business dealing, the Templars established financial networks across the whole of Christendom. They acquired large tracts of land, both in Europe and the Middle East; they bought and managed farms and vineyards; they built churches and castles; they were involved in manufacturing, import and export; they had their own fleet of ships; and at one point they even owned the entire island of Cyprus. The Order of the Knights Templar arguably qualifies as the world's first multinational corporation.
Decline
In the mid-12th century, the tide began to turn in the Crusades. The Muslim world had become more united under effective leaders such as Saladin, and dissension arose among Christian factions in and concerning the Holy Land.
The Knights Templar were occasionally at odds with the two other Christian military orders, the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights, and decades of internecine feuds weakened Christian positions, politically and militarily.
After the Templars were involved in several unsuccessful campaigns, including the pivotal Battle of the Horns of Hattin, Jerusalem was captured by Saladin's forces in 1187. The Crusaders retook the city in 1229, without Templar aid, but held it only briefly.
In 1244, the Khwarezmi Turks recaptured Jerusalem, and the city did not return to Western control until 1917 when the British captured it from the Ottoman Turks.
The Templars were forced to relocate their headquarters to other cities in the north, such as the seaport of Acre, which they held for the next century. But they lost that, too, in 1291, followed by their last mainland strongholds, Tortosa (in what is now Syria), and Atlit. Their headquarters then moved to Limassol on the island of Cyprus, and they also attempted to maintain a garrison on tiny Arwad Island, just off the coast from Tortosa.
In 1300, there was some attempt to engage in coordinated military efforts with the Mongols via a new invasion force at Arwad. In 1302 or 1303, however, the Templars lost the island to the Egyptian Mamluks in the Siege of Arwad. With the island gone, the Crusaders lost their last foothold in the Holy Land.
With the Order's military mission now less important, support for the organization began to dwindle. The situation was complex though, as over the two hundred years of their existence, the Templars had become a part of daily life throughout Christendom.
The organization's Templar Houses, hundreds of which were dotted throughout Europe and the Near East, gave them a widespread presence at the local level. The Templars still managed many businesses, and many Europeans had daily contact with the Templar network, such as by working at a Templar farm or vineyard, or using the Order as a bank in which to store personal valuables.
The Order was still not subject to local government, making it everywhere a "state within a state" - its standing army, though it no longer had a well-defined mission, could pass freely through all borders. This situation heightened tensions with some European nobility, especially as the Templars were indicating an interest in founding their own monastic state, just as the Teutonic Knights had done in Prussia and the Knights Hospitaller were doing with Rhodes.
In 1305, the new Pope Clement V, based in France, sent letters to both the Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the Hospitaller Grand Master Fulk de Villaret to discuss the possibility of merging the two Orders. Neither was amenable to the idea, but Pope Clement persisted, and in 1306 he invited both Grand Masters to France to discuss the matter. De Molay arrived first in early 1307, but de Villaret was delayed for several months. While waiting, De Molay and Clement discussed charges that had been made two years prior by an ousted Templar.
It was generally agreed that the charges were false, but Clement sent King Philip IV of France a written request for assistance in the investigation. King Philip was already deeply in debt to the Templars from his war with the English and decided to seize upon the rumors for his own purposes. He began pressuring the Church to take action against the Order, as a way of freeing himself from his debts.
On Friday, October 13, 1307 (a date sometimes linked with the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition) Philip ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The arrest warrant started with the phrase : "Dieu n'est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume" (free translation " God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom").
The Templars were charged with numerous offences (including apostasy, idolatry, heresy, obscene rituals and homosexuality, financial corruption and fraud, and secrecy).
Many of the accused confessed to these charges under torture, and these confessions, even though obtained under duress, caused a scandal in Paris. All interrogations were recorded on a thirty meter long parchment, kept at the "Archives nationales" in Paris. The prisoners were coerced to confess that they had spat on the Cross : "Moi Raymond de La Fre, 21 ans, reconnais que (J'ai) crachŽ trois fois sur la Croix, mais de bouche et pas de coeur" (free translation : "I, Raymond de La Fre, 21 years old, admit that I have spit three times on the Cross, but only from my mouth and not from my heart". The Templars were accused of idolatry. The parchment mentions a red, monochromatic image of a man on linen or cotton, qualified as an idol by the interrogators.
This suggests the presence of the Shroud of Turin.
In 1307 few people knew of its whereabouts. After the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Shroud, that had been in the possession of the Emperor, disappeared for about one century. It reappeared in the small town of Lirey, in the Champagne region of France around the years 1353 to 1357 in the possession of Geoffroy de Charny and later in ChambŽry in the possession of the Duke of Savoy.
After more bullying from Philip, Pope Clement then issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae on November 22, 1307, which instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets.
Pope Clement called for papal hearings to determine the Templars' guilt or innocence, and once freed of the Inquisitors' torture, many Templars recanted their confessions. Some had sufficient legal experience to defend themselves in the trials, but in 1310 Philip blocked this attempt, using the previously forced confessions to have dozens of Templars burned at the stake in Paris.
Convent of Christ in Castle Tomar, Portugal. Built in 1160 as a stronghold for the Knights Templar, it became the headquarters of the renamed Order of Christ. In 1983, it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
With Philip threatening military action unless the Pope complied with his wishes, Pope Clement finally agreed to disband the Order, citing the public scandal that had been generated by the confessions. At the Council of Vienne in 1312, he issued a series of papal bulls, including Vox in excelso, which officially dissolved the Order, and Ad providam, which turned over most Templar assets to the Hospitallers.
As for the leaders of the Order, the elderly Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who had confessed under torture, retracted his statement. His associate Geoffrey de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, followed de Molay's example and insisted on his innocence.
Both men were declared guilty of being relapsed heretics, and they were sentenced to burn alive at the stake in Paris on March 18, 1314. De Molay reportedly remained defiant to the end, asking to be tied in such a way that he could face the Notre Dame Cathedral and hold his hands together in prayer.
According to legend, he called out from the flames that both Pope Clement and King Philip would soon meet him before God. His actual words were recorded on the parchment as follows : "Dieu sait qui a tort et a p‘chŽ. Il va bientot arriver malheur ˆ ceux qui nous ont condamnŽs ˆ mort" (free translation : "God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death").
Pope Clement died only a month later, and King Philip died in a hunting accident before the end of the year.
With the last of the Order's leaders gone, the remaining Templars around Europe were either arrested and tried under the Papal investigation (with virtually none convicted), absorbed into other military orders such as the Knights Hospitaller, or pensioned and allowed to live out their days peacefully. Some may have fled to other territories outside Papal control, such as excommunicated Scotland or to Switzerland. Templar organizations in Portugal simply changed their name, from Knights Templar to Knights of Christ - see Order of Christ (Portugal). the French King and ordered the group to disband.
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posted
Narmerthot Bitcoin is a digital currency that maybe the strongest currency in the world but since Bitcoin is not control by the International Bankers they may destroy it in the future.
This book is talking about the Knight Templar and banking but unfortunately it is not in the Amazon Kindle.
The Warriors and the Bankers, the research and writing team of Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe bring their combined experiences to bear on the question asked for hundreds of years, What became of the Knights Templar? Arrested in 1307, dissolved in 1312 and executed by 1314, the Templars have been the subject of many theories concerning their possible survival. This book examines these theories against new evidence and information. Additionally the authors put forth, for the first time, a completely NEW theory that has caught the ears, eyes and attention of many readers. The ultimate conclusion is that the Templars did survive, virtually intact, and that, in a very direct sense, they may still be one of the most potent forces at work in the world at the start of the new Millennium. The Warriors and the Bankers is eminently readable and is intended for both the serious student of Templarism or simply the interested observe
Tidjane Thiam the CEO of Credit Swiss Tidjane Thiam (born 29 July 1962)[1] is an Ivorian businessman and former politician who became the chief executive of Credit Suisse in June 2015.[3] Born in Côte d'Ivoire, he holds dual Ivorian and French citizenship. He studied advanced mathematics and physics in France before joining the management consultants McKinsey & Company in 1986, where he worked until 1994.[4]
From 1994 to 1999 he worked in Côte d'Ivoire first as chief executive of the National Bureau for Technical Studies (BNETD), reporting directly to the prime minister and the president, and from 1998 as both chairman of the BNETD and Minister of Planning and Development. Following the Ivorian coup of 1999, he resumed a private sector career and rejoined McKinsey in Paris from 2000 to 2002, then worked as a senior executive for Aviva before being recruited by Prudential plc. When appointed the chief executive of Prudential in 2009, he became the first black person to lead a FTSE 100 company.[4] On 10 March 2015, it was announced that Thiam would leave Prudential to become the next CEO of Credit Suisse, succeeding Brady Dougan.[5][6]
Sergio Ermotti CEO of UBS Warburg
Sergio P. Ermotti (born 11 May 1960 in Lugano, Switzerland) is a Swiss banker from Lugano, Switzerland. He is Group CEO of UBS since November 2011, having held the position of Group Chief Executive Officer on an interim basis since September 2011.[2] In 2014, following the restructuring process of the UBS AG, he was appointed to the same position of a Group Chief Executive Officer within the new UBS Group AG.[2]
They say the BIS is the Bank of the World Central Banks. They are regulating and coordinating the monetary policy of Central Banks in the world.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is an international financial institution[2] owned by central banks which "fosters international monetary and financial cooperation and serves as a bank for central banks".[3] The BIS carries out its work through its meetings programmes and through the Basel Process – hosting international groups pursuing global financial stability and facilitating their interaction. It also provides banking services, but only to central banks and other international organizations. It is based in Basel, Switzerland, with representative offices in Hong Kong and Mexico City.
The BIS was established in 1930 by an intergovernmental agreement between Germany, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, the United States and Switzerland.[4][5] It opened its doors in Basel, Switzerland on 17 May 1930.
The BIS was originally intended to facilitate reparations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, and to act as the trustee for the German Government International Loan (Young Loan) that was floated in 1930.[6] The need to establish a dedicated institution for this purpose was suggested in 1929 by the Young Committee, and was agreed to in August of that year at a conference at The Hague. A charter for the bank was drafted at the International Bankers Conference at Baden-Baden in November, and its charter was adopted at a second Hague Conference on January 20, 1930. According to the charter, shares in the bank could be held by individuals and non-governmental entities. However, the rights of voting and representation at the Bank’s General Meeting were to be exercised exclusively by the central banks of the countries in which the shares had been initially subscribed. The BIS was constituted as having corporate existence in Switzerland on the basis of an agreement with Switzerland acting as headquarters state for the bank. It also enjoyed certain immunities in the contracting states (Brussels Protocol 1936).
The BIS’s original task of facilitating World War I reparation payments quickly became obsolete. Reparation payments were first suspended (Hoover moratorium, June 1931) and then abolished altogether (Lausanne Agreement, July 1932). Instead, the BIS focused on its second statutory task, i.e. fostering the cooperation between its member central banks. It acted as a meeting forum for central banks and provided banking facilities to them. For instance, in the late 1930s, the BIS was instrumental in helping continental European central banks shipping out part of their gold reserves to London and New York.[7] At the same time, the BIS fell under the spell of the appeasement illusion. The most notorious incident in this context was the transfer of 23 tons of gold held by the BIS in London on behalf of the Czechoslovakian national bank to the German Reichsbank after Nazi Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939.[8]
At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the BIS Board of Directors – on which the main European central banks were represented – decided that the Bank should remain open, but that, for the duration of hostilities, no meetings of the Board of Directors were to take place and that the Bank should maintain a neutral stance in the conduct of its business. However, as the war dragged on evidence mounted that the BIS conducted operations that were helpful to the Germans. Also, throughout the war, the BIS accepted gold from the German Reichsbank in payment for prewar obligations linked to the Young Plan. This in spite of repeated Allied warnings not to accept gold or other assets from Nazi Germany. It later transpired that much of this gold had been looted (and subsequently remelted) by the Germans from the central banks in occupied territories. Some of this remelted gold included gold rings and other items from labor and prison camp victims.[9] Operations conducted by the BIS were viewed with increasing suspicion from London and Washington. The fact that top level German industrialists and advisors sat on the BIS board seemed to provide ample evidence of how the BIS might be used by Hitler throughout the war, with the help of American, British and French banks. Between 1933 and 1945 the BIS board of directors included Walther Funk, a prominent Nazi official, and Emil Puhl, as well as Hermann Schmitz, the director of IG Farben and Baron von Schroeder, the owner of the J.H. Stein Bank.
The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference recommended the "liquidation of the Bank for International Settlements at the earliest possible moment". This resulted in the BIS being the subject of a disagreement between the U.S. and British delegations. The liquidation of the bank was supported by other European delegates, as well as the United States (including Harry Dexter White and Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury),[10] but opposed by John Maynard Keynes, head of the British delegation.
Fearing that the BIS would be dissolved, Keynes went to Morgenthau hoping to prevent the dissolution, or have it postponed, but the next day the dissolution of the BIS was approved. However, the liquidation of the bank was never actually undertaken.[11] In April 1945, the new U.S. president Harry S. Truman and the British government suspended the dissolution, and the decision to liquidate the BIS was officially reversed in 1948.[12]
After the Second World War, the BIS retained an outspoken European focus. It acted as Agent for the European Payments Union (EPU, 1950–58), an intra-European clearing arrangement designed to help the European countries in restoring currency convertibility and free, multilateral trade.[13] During the 1960s – the heyday of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system – the BIS once again became the locus for transatlantic monetary cooperation. It coordinated the central banks’ Gold Pool and a number of currency support operations (e.g. Sterling Group Arrangements of 1966 and 1968). The Group of Ten (G10), including the main European economies, Canada, Japan and the United States, became the most prominent grouping.
With the end of the Bretton Woods system (1971–73) and the transition to floating exchange rates, financial stability issues came to the fore. The collapse of internationally active banks, such as Bankhaus Herstatt (1974), highlighted the need for improved banking supervision at an international level. The G10 Governors created the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision (BCBS), which remains active to this day. The BIS developed into a global meeting place for regulators and for developing international standards (Basel Concordat, Basel Capital Accord, Basel II and III). Through its member central banks, the BIS was actively involved in the resolution of the Latin American debt crisis (1982).
From 1964 until 1993, the BIS provided the secretariat for the Committee of Governors of the Central Banks of the Member States of the European Community (Committee of Governors).[14] This Committee had been created by European Council decision to improve monetary cooperation among the EC central banks. Likewise, the BIS in 1988-89 hosted most of the meetings of the Delors Committee (Committee for the Study of Economic and Monetary Union), which produced a blueprint for monetary unification subsequently adopted in the Maastricht Treaty (1992). In 1993, when the Committee of Governors was replaced by the European Monetary Institute (EMI – the precursor of the ECB), it moved location from Basel to Frankfurt, cutting its ties with the BIS.
In the 1990s-2000s, the BIS successfully globalised, breaking out of its traditional European core. This was reflected in a gradual increase in its membership (from 33 shareholding central bank members in 1995 to 60 in 2013, which together represent roughly 95% of global GDP), and also in the much more global composition of the BIS Board of Directors. In 1998, the BIS opened a Representative Office for Asia and the Pacific in the Hong Kong SAR. A BIS Representative Office for the Americas was established in 2002 in Mexico DF.
The BIS was originally owned by both central banks and private individuals, since the United States, Belgium and France had decided to sell all or some of the shares allocated to their central banks to private investors. BIS shares traded on stock markets, which made the bank an unusual organization: an international organization (in the technical sense of public international law), yet allowed for private shareholders. Many central banks had similarly started as such private institutions; for example, the Bank of England was privately owned until 1946. In more recent years the BIS has bought back its once publicly traded shares.[15] It is now wholly owned by BIS members (central banks) but still operates in the private market as a counterparty, asset manager and lender for central banks and international financial institutions.[16] Profits from its transactions are used, among other things, to fund the bank's other international activities.
As an organization of central banks, the BIS seeks to make monetary policy more predictable and transparent among its 60-member central banks, except in the case of Eurozone countries which forfeited the right to conduct monetary policy in order to implement the euro. While monetary policy is determined by most sovereign nations, it is subject to central and private banking scrutiny and potentially to speculation that affects foreign exchange rates and especially the fate of export economies. Failures to keep monetary policy in line with reality and make monetary reforms in time, preferably as a simultaneous policy among all 60 member banks and also involving the International Monetary Fund, have historically led to losses in the billions as banks try to maintain a policy using open market methods that have proven to be based on unrealistic assumptions.
Central banks do not unilaterally "set" rates, rather they set goals and intervene using their massive financial resources and regulatory powers to achieve monetary targets they set. One reason to coordinate policy closely is to ensure that this does not become too expensive and that opportunities for private arbitrage exploiting shifts in policy or difference in policy, are rare and quickly removed.
Two aspects of monetary policy have proven to be particularly sensitive, and the BIS therefore has two specific goals: to regulate capital adequacy and make reserve requirements transparent.
Regulates capital adequacy[edit] Capital adequacy policy applies to equity and capital assets. These can be overvalued in many circumstances because they do not always reflect current market conditions or adequately assess the risk of every trading position. Accordingly, the Basel standards require the capital/asset ratio of internationally active commercial banks to be above a prescribed minimum international standard, to improve the resilience of the banking sector.
The main role of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, hosted by the BIS, is setting capital adequacy requirements. From an international point of view, ensuring capital adequacy is key for central banks, as speculative lending based on inadequate underlying capital and widely varying liability rules causes economic crises as "bad money drives out good" (Gresham's Law).
Flag of Switzerland
Switzerland (/ˈswɪtsərlənd/), officially the Swiss Confederation, is a federal republic in Europe. It consists of 26 cantons, and the city of Bern is the seat of the federal authorities.[1][2][note 4] The country is situated in Western-Central Europe,[note 5] and is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland is a landlocked country geographically divided between the Alps, the Swiss Plateau and the Jura, spanning an area of 41,285 km2 (15,940 sq mi). While the Alps occupy the greater part of the territory, the Swiss population of approximately eight million people is concentrated mostly on the plateau, where the largest cities are to be found: among them are the two global cities and economic centres Zürich and Geneva.
The establishment of the Old Swiss Confederacy dates to the late medieval period, resulting from a series of military successes against Austria and Burgundy. Swiss independence from the Holy Roman Empire was formally recognized in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The country has a history of armed neutrality going back to the Reformation; it has not been in a state of war internationally since 1815 and did not join the United Nations until 2002. Nevertheless, it pursues an active foreign policy and is frequently involved in peace-building processes around the world.[9] In addition to being the birthplace of the Red Cross, Switzerland is home to numerous international organisations, including the second largest UN office. On the European level, it is a founding member of the European Free Trade Association, but notably not part of the European Union or the European Economic Area. However, it participates in the Schengen Area and the European Single Market through bilateral treaties.
Spanning the intersection of Germanic and Romance Europe, Switzerland comprises four main linguistic and cultural regions: German, French, Italian and Romansh. Although the majority of the population are German speaking, Swiss national identity is rooted in a common historical background, shared values such as federalism and direct democracy,[10] and Alpine symbolism.[11][12] Due to its linguistic diversity, Switzerland is known by a variety of native names: Schweiz [ˈʃvaɪts] (German);[note 6] Suisse [sɥis(ə)] (French); Svizzera [ˈzvittsera] (Italian); and Svizra [ˈʒviːtsrɐ] or [ˈʒviːtsʁːɐ] (Romansh).[note 7] On coins and stamps, Latin (frequently shortened to "Helvetia") is used instead of the four living languages.
Switzerland is one of the most developed countries in the world, with the highest nominal wealth per adult and the eighth-highest per capita gross domestic product according to the IMF.[13][14] Switzerland ranks at or near the top globally in several metrics of national performance, including government transparency, civil liberties, quality of life, economic competitiveness, and human development. Zürich and Geneva have each been ranked among the top cities in the world in terms of quality of life, with the former ranked second globally, according to Mercer.[15]
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@Mena7 Years ago, I read Holy Blood and Holy Grail. It was alleged that a french Fraternity, Priory de Sion, was a remnant of Knights of Templar.
The extermination of Knights of Templar was similar to the Spanish Proscription of Jesuits: Religious Orders becoming more powerful than their host governments.
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Nice post Jantavanta and Lamin. The Spaniard Jaime Caruana is the General Manager or GM of the BIS
Jaime Caruana (born 14 March 1952) is the General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements. His five-year term began on 1 April 2009. In June 2013, it was extended until end-March 2017. He was also the Governor of the Bank of Spain from July 2000 to July 2006.[1]
Biography[edit] Caruana was born in Valencia, and graduated in telecommunications engineering from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) in 1974. He served a six-year term as Bank of Spain Governor, beginning 21 July 2000 and ending in July 2006. Currently he is a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty. He was also chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision since May, 2003. Caruana took over the Basel II project at a difficult time, and won respect and praise from both regulators and the financial services industry for ultimately delivering the revised accord in June 2004.[2] In August 2006, Jaime Caruana was appointed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by Rodrigo de Rato, as counsellor and director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department, a new financial, capital and regulatory department.[3]
He is succeeded at the Bank of Spain by former secretary of State for Commerce, Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez.
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In the first month of each year that is January the most important CEO of Western corporations,CEO of Western banks, CEO of other country corporations and Western politicians meet at Davos in Switzerland to discuss their economic plan and agenda for the world.
Fearful global elite reeling from the rise in populism and Trump election gather at Davos and admit 'there's something unprecedented going on and we can't deal with it' The World Economic Forum is being held this week in Davos, Switzerland Xi Jinping will be the first Chinese leader ever to attend the annual get-together But the CEOs, bankers and politicians are flummoxed by the rise of 'populism' Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump have shocked mainstream politicians
World leaders, CEOs and bankers are in Davos, Switzerland (pictured) this week for the World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum is often perceived from the outside as a shindig where the global elite get together and agree how they can carve up the world and the profits that are to be had
China's President Xi Jinping (pictured, right with Switzerland's President Doris Leuthard) has been invited to attend Davos, the first time Beijing has been represented by its head of state
Armed Swiss police, in Alpine gear, keep an eye on the summit venue amid heightened fears of a terrorist attack
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The country of Switzerland is the best watch manufacturer in the World. The best and most popular watch brands are from Switzerland. Maybe Switzerland is one of the country that set up the historical astrological time or the order of the age (whatever that means lol).
There is a great watch expo every year in the city of Basel in Switzerland.
Baselworld Watch and Jewellery Show is a trade show of the international watch and jewellery industry, organized each spring in the city of Basel, Switzerland.
It comprises about 2,100 exhibitors from over 45 countries, including the leading watch and jewellery brands, as well as companies specializing in precious gems. The show attracts over 94,000 visitors.
History The history of the show dates back to 1917 with the opening of the first Schweizer Mustermesse Basel (muba), of which a section was devoted to watches and jewellery.
1925 muba invited several watch manufacturers 1931 the Schweizer Uhrenmesse (Swiss Watch Show) was first held in a dedicated pavilion. After 1972's Europe's meeting place exhibition, companies from France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom were also invited. 1983 the show changed its name to BASEL and two numerals denoting the exhibition year, e.g., BASEL 83. 1986, companies from outside Europe were included for the first time, reflecting the increased number of visitors from outside Europe. 1995 the show was renamed to BASEL 95 - The World Watch, Clock and Jewellery Show. 1999, a new hall with 36,000 square meters exhibition space was added. The year 2000 saw an increase of 6 per cent in trade visitors. 2003 the show was again renamed to Baselworld, The Watch and Jewellery Show. 2004, with the introduction of a new hall complex, the exhibition area extended to 160,000 square meters, attracting more than 89,000 visitors.
Hublot Big Bang Unico Sapphire A testament to watchmaking with sapphire, this completely see-through 45mm Big Bang is comprised of a multipart case, bezel, and crystal, all of which blend seamlessly with the silicone strap. The only components that aren't sapphire are the combination titanium-and-sapphire crown and pushers, the titanium screws, and the strap-release system. Lightweight and waterproof to 100 meters with a 72-hour power reserve, it provides a great view of Hublot's in-house Unico flyback chronograph movement.
Price: $57,900
Patek Philippe Ref. 5930G World Time Chronograph Meet Patek's first-ever timepiece containing both a world-time indication and a chronograph. Boasting an entirely new in-house movement, this 39.5mm white gold manages to be the thinnest such watch in its category, at just shy of 13mm thick. Blending stylistic elements of the Bauhaus-inspired Ref. 96 and the winglet-style strap lugs from the 1940s and 1950s, the three-zone dial elegantly melds blue and silvery display of the 23 world time zones and chronograph readouts.
Price: $73,700
Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean 600m Master Chronometer At 39.5mm, this “chocolate” Seamster boasts a new Co-Axial movement for the series with 55-hour power reserve. The black enamel face and Ceragold bezel is an attractive match with the pink Sedna Gold — an alloy of gold, copper, and palladium that's scratch-resistant and less likely to suffer from discoloration. It’s also water resistant to 600 meters. The applied and polished markers on the dial are filled generously with high-quality luminant.
Price: $22,500
Rolex Cosmograph Daytona The much-loved 40mm Daytona now features a bezel made of black ceramic, a nod to the black Plexiglas insert from 1965. The numerals on the bezel’s tachymeter scale — a hallmark of auto racing chronographs — are applied via a special process developed by Rolex. Other new features include black rings around the chronograph subdials while hairsprings made of Parachrom, an alloy composite, are said to be 10 times more precise in case of shocks than a traditional hairspring.
Price: $12,400
Tag Heuer Monza A return to its racing roots sees the return of the iconic Monza watch, first created by Jack Heuer in 1976 to celebrate F1 legend Niki Lauda’s first world championship title with Scuderia Ferrari, the racing team for which the Swiss watch brand was then official timekeeper. This modern 42mm version is the first to include both the tachymeter and pulsometer scales within the cushion-shaped case as well as the original type font on the all-black matte look dial.
There are amazing feats of watchmaking, and then there is the utter re-invention of watchmaking itself. More than any other brand in recent years, Ressence has created an entirely new type of timekeeping, from the display of hours and minutes (orbiting discs) to the movement (magnetic transfer) to the case (no crown, oil-filled). Their latest creation, the Type 5B, continues the evolution in the form of that most basic of tool watches, the diver. Taking advantage of the low light refraction properties of its oil-filled case, the Type 5’s dial can be read at extreme angles underwater. The oil also mitigates water pressure while diving, allowing the watch to remain slim, without a massive crystal and a heavy titanium case. A rotating external bezel makes this a proper diving instrument, compliant even with the ISO 6425 dive-watch standard — but we suspect this one will spend most of its time topside.
here is badass, and then there is Carl Brashear. The first African-American Master Diver in the US Navy, Brashear also became the first amputee Navy diver after losing a leg while recovering a nuclear warhead in the Mediterranean. If anyone deserves a commemorative dive watch, it’s him. Based on last year’s Baselworld darling, the Diver 65, the Carl Brashear Limited Edition’s case is made from bronze (a nod to the type of diving helmet Brashear wore), which offsets nicely against the deep marine-blue dial with its creamy markers. A thick stitched leather strap completes the picture but can easily be swapped out for a diving strap, should you have errant sunken warheads to fetch.
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There was more elbow room at Baselworld this year. Chalk it up to a skittish economy or the emergence of the smartwatch but whatever it was — it sure made for easier walking in Hall 1. Watch brands showed signs of caution too, many dropping prices and reducing new models. But there was still a whole lot of horological goodness to enjoy.
While it’s tempting to look for trends in the watch world, the fact is, product development takes years rather than months. So reacting to fashion fads or customer tastes is a slow process. But we did see a lot of red and black, more bronze cases, blue dials and smaller diameters this year. Some companies pushed the boundaries of style and engineering, and others scaled back to the basics. After 60 appointments over five days, gallons of espresso and a lot of chocolate, we’ve distilled a list of our favorite new timepieces from Baselworld 2016.
here may be no watch that deserves a moonphase complication more. The new Speedmaster Co-Axial Master Chronometer is a descendent of the first watch worn on the moon, but now is powered by OMEGA’s calibre 9904, a technical tour de force with a precision verified by Switzerland’s independent standards agency, even under the influence of 15,000 Gauss (roughly that of an MRI scanner). Its moonphase disc is so detailed, if you look closely enough, you can even see Neil Armstrong’s footprint in the Sea of Tranquility.
Audemars Piguet is the rare brand that can straddle pop culture and nerd appeal. Its Royal Oak Offshore collection is beloved among action stars thanks to its chunky styling and nightclub cred, while its high watchmaking draws horology geeks in droves (making for quite the mixed crowd at its boutiques). The Royal Oak Double Balance Wheel Openworked continues to play to both sides of the aisle. While the rose gold Royal Oak case is the quintessential luxe sports watch vehicle, a double balance wheel is deep nerd territory. Stacking two balance wheels on top of each other greatly enhances chronometric stability, offsetting each other to provide optimum amplitude for precise timekeeping (told you it was nerdy). Yet even if you don’t grasp the horological implications of this groundbreaking movement, you can at least admire it through the exquisite openworked dial, which gives view into the city under glass.
IWC rebooted its Pilot’s Watch collection this year with downsized cases, a return to classic design cues and better pricing. But it also added a brand-new complication watch, the Pilot’s Watch Timezoner Chronograph, to the mix. The Timezoner is, as its name suggests, a travel watch. But unlike most travel watches, which make use of a world time complication or 24-hour hand, the Timezoner takes a more innovative, and incredibly simple, approach. The rotating bezel of the watch, which is marked with major cities in 24 world time zones, is actually linked to the watch movement itself. Pushing the spring-loaded bezel while turning adjusts the hour hand to reflect the current time offset for the city positioned at the top of the bezel. A separate red hour hand indicates whether it is a.m. or p.m. Meanwhile, the watch is also a chronograph, functioning independently to track elapsed time up to 12 hours. It is a pilot’s watch that a pilot might actually find useful.
The Vacheron Overseas has largely lived in the shadows of two other luxury sports watches that emerged in the 1970s, the Patek Philippe Nautilus and the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. But while those two titans have become almost overexposed, the Overseas has long maintained a sort of subtle appeal. This year, Vacheron refreshed the Overseas, fitting all of the watches in the family with different movements and refining the aesthetics. The chronograph and date references are the most accessible, but the Ultra-Thin models are real purists’ watches.
The Overseas Ultra-Thin lacks even a sweep seconds hand on its sunburst gray dial, keeping the movement to 2.45mm thick. The hallmark angular lines are still present, with a crenellated bezel and a white gold case that flows seamlessly into the bracelet. That bracelet has been updated with a quick-release mechanism that allows you to swap it for a rubber or leather one without tools, lending a new versatility to a watch that already did a lot of things well.
Frederique Constant is all about bringing fine watchmaking to the masses, and this year that goal has reached its peak with the Manufacture Perpetual Calendar. The Quantième Perpetuel has long sat at the top of the heap in terms of watch complications. Kept wound up, a perpetual calendar will account for all short months (June, November, etc.), as well as Leap Years, until the year 2100, while also keeping track of the phases of the Moon. You might expect a watch that does all of this mechanically to cost a small fortune; most do. But Frederique Constant brings it in at $8,700 — which may sound like a lot, but is thousands less than its nearest competitor
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Where do bitcoins come from? With paper money, a government decides when to print and distribute money. Bitcoin doesn't have a central government.
With Bitcoin, miners use special software to solve math problems and are issued a certain number of bitcoins in exchange. This provides a smart way to issue the currency and also creates an incentive for more people to mine.
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his Zodiac illustrates the signs and houses around the astrological wheel.
The Zodiac begins here with Aries and travels its astrological route through the twelve signs. This wheel shows how the sign-rulers for each of the twelve houses, begins with Aries in the 1st House and ends with Pisces in the 12th House.
Chinese zodiac
Sochi zodiac clocktower in Russia
Lernean Hydra
Hercules fighting Hydra
Hercules fighting Hydra
Hydra of Lerna
Mena: I think the Western world power that allow them to dominate the world is a Hydra type power. The USA alone is not the reason the Western World or White European people are dominating the world. the many heads of the Western World power system are the 13 Illuminati Royal and banking families of Europe, the 9 Papal families of Italy, the Freemason Secret Society, the Jesuit, the Knight of Malta, the Rosicrucian etc. Those European families and organizations are competing with each other but will unite to fight non White people external threat like the Chineses, the Indians and the Africans. I think European pyramid of power organization should be model to the modern African countries.
The Lernaean Hydra or Hydra of Lerna (Greek: Λερναῖα Ὕδρα, Lernaîa Hýdra), more often known simply as the Hydra, was a serpentine water monster in Greek and Roman mythology. Its lair was the lake of Lerna in the Argolid, which was also the site of the myth of the Danaids. Lerna was reputed to be an entrance to the Underworld[1] and archaeology has established it as a sacred site older than Mycenaean Argos. In the canonical Hydra myth, the monster is killed by Heracles, using sword and fire, as the second of his Twelve Labors.[2]
According to Hesiod, the Hydra was the offspring of Typhon and Echidna.[3] It possessed many heads, the exact number of which varies according to the source. Later versions of the Hydra story add a regeneration feature to the monster: for every head chopped off, the Hydra would regrow one or multiple heads.[4]
The Hydra had poisonous breath and blood so virulent that even its scent was deadly
World Pyramid of power
World Pyramid of power
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In this thread I speculated a lot on the Knight Templars one of the World first modern international bankers and switzerland. In the video Machineries of our World the Oxford University graduate researcher and write Robert Farrell states the Venetian merchant Zeno explored the East coast of Canada before Christopher Colombus. Zeno met a Micmac chief who had book written in Latin in his library. those Latin books are probably the proof that Roman explorers came to America. In another video a researcher stated there was a native American bust made in 200 CE time in the Roman Empire expose in a Central Italian museum. World History is maybe base on the conspiracy of the World ruling elite.
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As aN Afrocentrist and conspiracy theorist I am always learning something new. In this Mr Astrotheologist Santos Bonaci I have learned the name of the country Swiss in French and Switzerland in English means the Land of the Sisters of Isis. The name of the Suez canal is the God Zeus in reverse. the name of the city of Venice build on water come Phoenicia who build one of their Canaanite city on water. Pliny stated we the Roman everybody knows are the people of Saturn. According to Santo Bernaci an australian of Italian and Colombian descent if you change the L in Lati for an S it become Satin, Satan, Saturn. Paris is the House of Isis. A Mortgage Mort(dead in French) gage is a 30 years dead/debt pledge to the bank.
Sweden's average labour costs are €43 ($59) an hour, enough to rank it as the highest rate in the EU, fresh German statistics revealed on Monday.
Sweden's hourly labour costs were the highest in the EU throughout 2013, reported Germany's Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on Monday.
At €43 (388 kronor) per hour, Swedish employers pay almost double the private sector average of €23.70 in the European Union (EU 27). The Euro currency area, meanwhile, has average hourly costs of €28.70.
Sweden's result marked a 1.6 percent increase compared to 2012.
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I agree ish Gebor the quality of life in Sweden for its population is one of the highest in the world. The average labor cost in Sweden is $59 and in the USA is $44.52. There are now a lot of new Muslim immigrants from Syria and other countries causing problems to the Swedish socialist government.
I disagree with Santo Bonacci when he stated the Vatican, the Jesuit and the Black Nobilty are running the world now. I think Anglo Saxon banking and royal families from the UK, USA, Germany are running the world. The Vatican, the Jesuit and Black nobility are junior partners. There is a saying the money man run the world and who has the gold rule. The owners of the biggest banks and corporations in the World are not Italians or Jesuits. The owners of the biggest banks and corporations in the world are Anglo Saxon British and Americans.
The Roman Catholic bankers have been bad bankers in history. The roman Catholic Church was against the payment of interest. Roman Catholic countries like Spain and Portugal during the colonial era stole tons of gold and silver coins from Latin America who were mined by Native Americans and Africans slave labors but 200 years after the colonization of Latin Americ Spain was bankrupted. The Anglo Saxon people after they have moved form Venice, the Iberian peninsula to the Netherlands and then to England created the Bank of England in the 17 cent CE and took over control of the world financial system and the world trade.
Man is a sexual animal, a man will get aroused sexually just by seeing the buttock and the breasts of a woman walking. A man who is not having sex can become a psychopath. The ROMAN Catholic have 414,313 priests who are celibate, not having sex and not having wives and children to love. Because of that I think a lot of Catholic priest are hypocrite sexually fustrated psychopaths. I think celibacy of priesthood is a form of sorcery. Thats why the Roman Catholic Church and priests were behind The genocide of the Native Americans, The African slave trades, the burning of women call witches and the raping of young boys all over the world that is still going on unpunished in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. those so call representent of God on Earth LOL.
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Mena: The Pope is protected by the Swiss guards coming from Switzerland the country of international banking secrecy or the country o thef Knight Templar bankers.
Swiss guard in the Vatican
Swiss guard in the Vatican protecting the Pope
Swiss guards ceremony in the Vatican
Pope Benedict reviewing the Swiss guard
The Swiss guards
Vatican Swiss guards
Conclave of Pius V, with Swiss Guard guarding the entrance (Codex Maggi, 1578)
Swiss guard regular duty uniform
The Pontifical Swiss Guard (also Papal Swiss Guard, or just Swiss Guard; Latin: Pontificia Cohors Helvetica or Cohors Pedestris Helvetiorum a Sacra Custodia Pontificis; Italian: Guardia Svizzera Pontificia; German: Päpstliche Schweizergarde; French: Garde suisse pontificale) is small force maintained by the Holy See, it is responsible for the safety of the Pope, including the security of the Apostolic Palace. The Swiss Guard serves as the de facto military of Vatican City. Established in 1506 under Pope Julius II, the Pontifical Swiss Guard is among the oldest military units in continuous operation.[2]
The dress uniform is of blue, red, orange and yellow with a distinctly Renaissance appearance. The modern guard has the role of bodyguard of the Pope. The Swiss Guard is equipped with traditional weapons, such as the halberd, as well as with modern firearms. Since the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981, a much stronger emphasis has been placed on the guard's non-ceremonial roles, and has seen enhanced training in unarmed combat and small arms.
Recruits to the guards must be unmarried Swiss Catholic males between 19 and 30 years of age who have completed basic training with the Swiss Armed Forces.[3]
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The New Yorker A REPORTER AT LARGE MAY 30, 2016 ISSUE THE BANK ROBBER The computer technician who exposed a Swiss bank’s darkest secrets. By Patrick Radden Keefe
Hervé Falciani, who took client data from H.S.B.C., was indicted in Switzerland, jailed in Spain, and celebrated in France. Photograph by Moises Saman / Magnum for The New Yorker A few days before Christmas in 2008, Hervé Falciani was in a meeting at his office, in Geneva, when a team of police officers arrived to arrest him. Falciani, who was thirty-six, worked for H.S.B.C., then the largest bank in the world. He was on the staff of the company’s private Swiss bank, which serves clients who are wealthy enough to afford the minimum deposit—half a million dollars—required to open an account. Falciani had been at H.S.B.C. for eight years, initially in Monaco and then in Geneva. He was a computer technician who helped supervise security systems for the handling of client data. He had grown up in Monaco, where as a young man he had worked as a croupier at the Casino de Monte-Carlo, and developed an excellent poker face. As the Swiss police escorted him from the building, he insisted that he had done nothing wrong.
Officers questioned Falciani at a nearby station. They were investigating a data theft from the bank. Since 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva banned banks from revealing the private information of their customers, Switzerland had thrived on its reputation as a stronghold of financial secrecy. International élites could place their fortunes beyond the reach of tax authorities in their own countries. For Swiss wealth managers, who oversaw more than two trillion dollars in international deposits, the promise to maintain financial privacy was akin to a religious vow of silence. Switzerland is the home of the numbered account: customers often specify that they prefer not to receive statements, in order to avoid a paper trail. In light of these safeguards, the notion of a breach at H.S.B.C. was shocking.
Police officials told Falciani that someone calling himself Ruben al-Chidiak had stolen client data from the bank. They weren’t sure how much information had been taken or how the theft had been engineered. But they suspected that Chidiak was a pseudonym, and that the real culprit was Falciani.
Falciani told the police that his job was to protect data: How could they accuse him of compromising such information? As darkness fell, he asked to go home. His wife, Simona, would be worried about him. The investigators released him, but instructed him to return for further questioning the next morning.
Falciani walked through streets strung with Christmas lights to his apartment, in a dingy building on the Rue des Mouettes. He and Simona packed a few bags, bundled their three-year-old daughter, Kim, against the cold, and prepared to flee the country. Despite his protests, Falciani had stolen the data.
When the Falcianis walked out of their apartment, they left the keys in the door. Falciani rented a car, and they drove through the Alps. The next morning, as Swiss investigators assembled at the police station in Geneva, Falciani was approaching the South of France. He left the rental car at the airport in Nice. His wife and daughter went on to Italy, for a visit with Simona’s family; Falciani travelled to his parents’ home, in Castellar, a hill town near the French-Italian border.
W. Somerset Maugham once described the Côte d’Azur as “a sunny place for shady people,” and Falciani, who was now a fugitive, hunkered down in Castellar. As a precaution, he had not travelled with the stolen data, instead uploading the information to remote servers. He now downloaded the files onto his laptop. The Swiss had asked French authorities to help track down Falciani, and at dawn on January 7, 2009, gendarmes raided his parents’ house. The prosecutor in Nice who handled the case, Éric de Montgolfier, told me that authorities in Switzerland were so eager to seize Falciani’s computer that they sent a Swiss prosecutor to accompany the gendarmes.
The French police arrested Falciani and seized his MacBook Pro and his iPhone. But when he was out of earshot of the Swiss prosecutor, on the way to the police station in nearby Menton, he told the gendarmes that his computer contained information of possible interest to the French state: names, account numbers, account balances. The hard drive held evidence, he said, of “tax evasion committed by French people.” Falciani had obtained sixty thousand files relating to tens of thousands of H.S.B.C. clients from nearly every country. An H.S.B.C. lawyer later described Falciani’s crime as “the largest robbery of a bank ever committed in the world.”
Falciani’s flight to France coincided with the onset of the global financial crisis. Many countries were scrambling to secure revenues and crack down on citizens whose fortunes were stashed in offshore tax havens. Years before the leak, this April, of the Panama Papers—a cache of documents from Mossack Fonseca, a law firm in Panama City that specializes in the creation of anonymous shell companies—there was ample evidence that the global plutocracy has many outlets for dissimulation in the realm of personal finance. “Only the little people pay taxes,” the billionaire Leona Helmsley once remarked—to her housekeeper. In 1989, the housekeeper recounted the exchange to a New York jury, and Helmsley spent eighteen months in prison. Most tax evasion, however, goes unpunished.
According to a 2012 study by James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey who now advises the Tax Justice Network, the world’s wealthiest people salt away at least twenty-one trillion dollars beyond the reach of tax authorities. In a book published last year, “The Hidden Wealth of Nations,” the economist Gabriel Zucman offers a lower, yet still enormous, estimate: $7.6 trillion, or eight per cent of the world’s personal financial wealth. Zucman calculates that “the fraud perpetuated through unreported foreign accounts each year costs about $200 billion to governments throughout the world.”
The data that Falciani stole could function as a treasure map, enabling a country like France to recover some of that lost revenue. Montgolfier said, “When you have so many French people with Swiss accounts”—he raised his eyebrows and his shoulders in a synchronized Gallic shrug—“it has a perfume of fraud.”
The Swiss prosecutor demanded that Montgolfier turn over Falciani’s laptop, but he demurred. “We’ll look at the computer,” he said. “Then we’ll decide if we return it.” To the Swiss government, Falciani was merely a thief, but the French saw him differently. “I would characterize him as a bit messianic,” Montgolfier told me. “There was the context of the world crisis, provoked by finance and all these big banks enabling tax evasion, and this guy just wanted to set the world free of those behaviors.” In a memoir recently published in Europe, “Earthquake on Planet Finance,” Falciani writes of his motives: “I wanted a different world for my daughter. I didn’t want her to grow up in a reality where money rules, where the abuse of power and the constant bypassing of the rules was the norm.”
As if to underline the incendiary implications of Falciani’s data, Montgolfier placed the laptop in a safe. While French authorities deliberated how to proceed, Falciani spent the night in a holding cell in Menton. But the next morning, in a gesture that indicated a shift in Falciani’s status, his guards surprised him with coffee and croissants.
When I first met Falciani, on a winter day at the Place d’Italie, in Paris, in 2014, he had been living under police protection, fearful that his life was endangered because of the information he had exposed about unscrupulous élites. He often travelled with three bodyguards, who were provided by the French state, but when we met Falciani arrived alone, on a fold-up scooter. He had proposed a curious venue for our meeting: Hippopotamus, a chain restaurant that caters to French children, with a cartoon mascot and colorful menus featuring an array of tiny steak frites.
“I’d like to buy a fowl.” ShareTweetBuy a cartoon Falciani ordered a slice of cheesecake. He was dressed in the manner of a Tarantino assassin: white shirt, skinny black tie, aggressively tailored black suit. He is soap-star handsome, with a dimpled chin, olive skin, and what one French newspaper described as “a commercial smile.” His sideburns tapered to a sliver. “My father worked in a bank,” Falciani said, in accented English. As a child in Monaco, which is one of Europe’s oldest tax havens, he often accompanied his father to work and marvelled at the discreet power of the institution. The bank was immaculate, and everybody spoke in hushed tones. It reminded Falciani of a church. After business hours, he liked to dash through the carpeted hallways.
As Falciani grew older, he noticed that the flow of money into Monaco was affected by political events. When war ravaged Lebanon during the eighties, wealthy Lebanese moved their families, and their fortunes, to the principality. When François Mitterrand came to power in France, the country’s aristocrats, fearful of new taxes, stashed their money in Monacan banks. Sometimes suitcases filled with cash arrived for deposit, and Falciani watched his father count the money by hand. The names of clients were never mentioned.
Falciani studied math and physics at the University of Nice, then began working in the Casino de Monte-Carlo, initially on the gaming floor and later in the casino’s internal bank, which extends lines of credit to wealthy clients. In 2000, he joined H.S.B.C. Around the time he started working there, an employee named Stephen Troth, who had handled celebrity clients in Monaco, was discovered to have skimmed millions of dollars from their accounts. “It was a very simple scheme,” Falciani told me, adding that he had followed the scandal closely. When the fraud was revealed, the Monaco branch determined that it needed to improve the security of its internal network, and Falciani was one of the employees who worked on devising better systems. In 2006, he was transferred to the private bank in Geneva, where he undertook a similar project. He was excited about this new challenge, he recalled: “I had great expectations.”
H.S.B.C., or the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, traces its origins to 1865, and its early success to the opium trade. The bank has grown substantially over the past two decades—it now has nearly fifty million customers—and it has acquired a reputation for being less than scrupulous, even by the loose standards of international banking. In 2012, a U.S. Senate investigation concluded that H.S.B.C. had worked with rogue regimes, terrorist financiers, and narco-traffickers. The bank eventually acknowledged having laundered more than eight hundred million dollars in drug proceeds for Mexican and Colombian cartels. Carl Levin, of Michigan, who chaired the Senate investigation, said that H.S.B.C. had a “pervasively polluted” culture that placed profit ahead of due diligence. In December, 2012, H.S.B.C. avoided criminal charges by agreeing to pay a $1.9-billion penalty. The company’s C.E.O., Stuart Gulliver, said that he was “profoundly sorry” for the bank’s transgressions. No executives faced penalties.
The private bank in Geneva had become part of H.S.B.C. in 1999, when the company, which is headquartered in London, acquired Republic National Bank from the estate of Edmond Safra, the Lebanese-born financier. Safra had split his time among homes in Geneva, Monaco, and the Riviera town of Villefranche-sur-Mer, where he owned a palatial villa that had once belonged to King Leopold II, of Belgium. Many of Safra’s clients had been Russians alleged to have criminal ties. As a U.S. prosecutor once remarked, “Republic always had some very interesting customers who find the government looking at them, more so than maybe other banks.”
When Falciani arrived in Geneva, he told me, he realized that H.S.B.C. was engaged in a “gigantic swindle.” Clients were not only placing their fortunes in accounts that were “undeclared” to tax authorities; H.S.B.C. bankers were actively assisting clients in hiding their money, by setting up shell companies and sham trusts in the British Virgin Islands and Panama. In some instances, the bankers were handing customers hundred-thousand-dollar bricks of U.S. bills, allowing money to be smuggled back home. In a subsequent investigation by French prosecutors, an H.S.B.C. client said that the bank had instructed him to “make a company in Panama, which should open an account at H.S.B.C. in Lugano, into which I should transfer all my holdings, in order to not be hit by this tax.”
Like many Swiss banks, H.S.B.C. offered “hold mail” accounts, refraining from sending any statements or other mail to clients. One might suppose that the inconvenience of such an arrangement would make it attractive only to the rare client who fetishized privacy, but nearly fifteen thousand clients chose this method—roughly half of the account holders at H.S.B.C.’s Swiss bank. Another client questioned in the subsequent investigation recalled that when he wanted to make a deposit he would meet his account manager in a public place. “I would give him an envelope holding my money, in cash,” he explained. “And a few days later he would tell me by phone that the funds had been credited to my account in Switzerland.” H.S.B.C. has numerous offices in Paris, but, according to the French investigation, when the Swiss bankers visited clients there they preferred to meet in cafés; in a similar spirit of concealment, account holders used pay phones when making calls to Switzerland. One client pointed out that the furtive face-to-face meetings offered “a bit of reassurance about the money I had in Switzerland, since I had no documents or anything that attested to my having an account.”
Although the conduct that Falciani witnessed may have been illegal, it was fairly standard practice for Swiss banks at the time. A 2014 U.S. Senate report describes a Credit Suisse banker travelling to America to meet a client for breakfast at a Mandarin Oriental hotel, and passing along an issue of Sports Illustrated in which account statements were concealed between the pages.
Swiss banks routinely dispatched emissaries to cultivate new clients at art shows and regattas, and the illegality of the service was implicit in the pitch: if you bank with us, your fortune will not be taxed. It is not illegal for a person or a corporation to hold a Swiss bank account, or to engage in tax “avoidance”—skirting tax requirements through gymnastic accounting and the exploitation of loopholes. But tax evasion, in which wealth is actively concealed from authorities, is illegal, and the behavior of Swiss bankers often suggested that they knew they were crossing the line. According to testimony in a 2014 criminal trial in Florida, representatives of the Swiss bank U.B.S. who travelled to such events as Art Basel to recruit clients carried encrypted laptops that were configured with an emergency password, so that they could erase the hard drive with a few keystrokes. An unnamed Swiss banker, speaking to the Times, recalled telling colleagues, “We all have one foot in prison.” He observed to the paper, “Maybe that’s why we were all paid so much.”
Most Swiss banks had compliance procedures designed to prevent tax evasion, money laundering, and other financial crimes. But Sue Shelley, who until 2013 was an H.S.B.C. executive vice-president in charge of compliance in Luxembourg, and who worked closely with the Geneva bank, told me that “compliance really took a back seat” to making profits. Shelley found that when compliance officers raised too many questions about large deposits with dodgy origins they risked being sidelined. Compliance was often perceived as “a business-prevention department,” and as a result the division was chronically understaffed. “We kept finding more and more red flags that we didn’t have the resources to address,” she said.
When I asked Falciani about compliance at the bank, he said, “They just do a few checks.” He said that he tried to sound the alarm internally and was ignored—a claim that the bank disputes. To Falciani, the bankers at H.S.B.C. were little more than crooks in pinstripes. “I spent too many years waiting for something to change,” he told me. Eventually, he took matters into his own hands.
“My parents hate it.” ShareTweetBuy a cartoon It started with the gradual accumulation of client data. In theory, this should have been impossible: one principle of security at Swiss banks is that client information is distributed in “cellular” fashion, so that no individual has access to too much data. The bank’s computer system was “subdivided into airtight compartments,” Falciani maintains, and each employee was instructed not to wonder about what was happening beyond his own computer screen. In order to preserve the anonymity of accounts, only a few employees knew the identity behind any account number.
But, like Edward Snowden, with whom he claims a strong affinity, Falciani was a systems guy. His technical expertise allowed him to outmaneuver the bank’s security software. In Geneva, he was working on a new customer-relations management system. One day, as he harvested data from the bank’s internal network, he says, he stumbled upon information to which he should not have had access: not just the names and account numbers of customers but also the confidential notes that H.S.B.C. bankers maintained about their meetings with clients. “I’d never heard about this sort of flaw in the computer system,” Falciani later told the investigators. The data were being updated in real time—it seemed that he had stumbled into a wormhole that held the bank’s deepest secrets. He even came across the details of his own account with the bank. At this point, another computer technician might have hastened to inform his superiors about the vulnerability. Falciani did not.
Nobody knows exactly how Falciani purloined such a staggering volume of sensitive data. Alexandre Zeller, who at the time was the head of H.S.B.C.’s Swiss operations, has spoken of the theft as if it were a magic trick. In a deposition provided to French investigators, Thibaut Lestrade, a technician with the French tax administration, praised Falciani’s wizardry: “It wouldn’t have been enough to just press a button and copy a whole grouping of data. There were data that came from several different systems which, I suspect, were not made to be connected to one another.” A confidential investigative file compiled by Swiss authorities notes that Falciani has “a certain talent for computing” and describes him as “an autodidact” who is “passionate about the exploration of data and the establishment of links within them.”
When I asked Falciani how he had avoided triggering digital alarms, he explained that he had help from a shadowy league of like-minded professionals. “We started to work out a strategy,” he said.
“Who is ‘we’?” I asked.
“The Network,” he replied.
“How many people are in the Network?”
He smiled cryptically. “I don’t want to give too much detail.”
According to Falciani, the Network was a loose confederation of “anti-tax-evasion crusaders,” consisting of law-enforcement officers, lawyers, and spies. He told me that the Network not only helped him to steal the data; it facilitated his escape to France. H.S.B.C., which conducted an internal investigation after Falciani became a fugitive, maintains that his story about the Network is a ruse, and that he had only one co-conspirator: a thirty-four-year-old Lebanese woman named Georgina Mikhael, who had become a technical administrator at H.S.B.C. in September, 2006. Mikhael, who has since returned to Beirut, has a throaty voice, large dark eyes, and caramel-colored hair. She and Falciani worked in adjacent offices, and they became close. They would leave the building to get coffee or to exercise at the gym. Mikhael knew that Falciani was married, but she sensed that he was unhappy in his marriage, and he looked at her, she later said, as if he could “devour me with his eyes.” Before long, they had embarked on an affair.
The prosecutor in Nice, Éric de Montgolfier, discovered that the files on Falciani’s hard drive were encrypted—an unintelligible compost of names, nationalities, account numbers, and deposit amounts. French authorities established a task force to decode the information, calling it Operation Chocolate. (“A dumb name,” a French official acknowledged. “But we weren’t going to call it Operation H.S.B.C.”) In February, 2009, twenty specialists assembled at a hotel in Nice and set to work, in close consultation with Falciani, who provided passwords to decrypt the information and advice on how to organize it. By the end of the summer, they had extracted a list of a hundred thousand names that were connected to H.S.B.C. accounts. Éric Woerth, the French budget minister at the time, announced that the French government had recovered the names of three thousand taxpayers who held undeclared accounts in Switzerland, remarking, “This is the first time we have this kind of information: accurate, with names, account numbers, and amounts on deposit. This is exceptional.”
Swiss officials threatened to halt a series of unrelated intergovernmental initiatives if the French refused to return the data. The Swiss newspaper Le Temps characterized the clash over Falciani’s files as “a diplomatic earthquake.” One Swiss justice official sent Montgolfier an intemperate letter saying that Falciani had not merely damaged the bank; he had attacked the Swiss state. “It was extraordinary,” Montgolfier said. “To harm H.S.B.C. was to harm Switzerland.”
The agitation of the Swiss should not have been surprising. By the time Falciani handed the H.S.B.C. data to the French, the Swiss tradition of financial secrecy was coming under assault. In 2007, an American banker who had worked for U.B.S. in Geneva, Bradley Birkenfeld, approached U.S. authorities with information about how the bank had helped thousands of Americans evade taxes. Birkenfeld himself had provided a variety of “concierge” tax-evasion services: he once bought diamonds for an American client, then smuggled them into the U.S. inside a toothpaste tube. “This was an orchestrated money-laundering, tax-evasion machine,” Birkenfeld told me. “In Switzerland, you can do whatever you want. You want to walk in the door with a hundred million dollars? You can deposit it. Have a nice day. Never pay taxes again.” Although the European Central Bank plans to eliminate the five-hundred-euro note, given that high-denomination bills are perhaps most useful to criminals, Switzerland still has a thousand-franc note (roughly, a thousand dollars). “They have the largest currency denomination in the world—what does that tell you?” Birkenfeld said. “One time, in Geneva, I took a thousand-Swiss-franc note and bought a pack of gum. The guy behind the counter didn’t blink an eye.”
As a result of Birkenfeld’s leak, U.B.S. was forced to turn over to the I.R.S. the details of more than forty-five hundred clients with undeclared accounts, and the bank eventually paid a fine of seven hundred and eighty million dollars. In 2008, Switzerland’s finance minister, Hans-Rudolf Merz, warned other countries that if the world tried to crack down on Swiss bank secrecy it was liable “to break its teeth.” When the Group of 20 met in London in 2009, offshore accounts and tax evasion were high on the agenda for the first time, under the rubric “The End of Bank Secrecy.” Neutrality is another cherished Swiss tradition, but now Switzerland’s closest neighbors were tabulating the ways in which bank secrecy had enriched the country at the expense of others. As Nicholas Shaxson suggests in his book “Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens,” the Swiss banking industry was predicated on the idea that “it is perfectly O.K. for one jurisdiction to exercise its sovereign right to get rich by undermining the sovereign laws and rules of other places.”
In this political context, the Falciani list posed an existential threat to the Swiss economy. The files had ended up in the possession of the French, but they contained incriminating details related to H.S.B.C. clients around the world. It was not long before other governments began asking the French to share information. Early in 2010, tax authorities in the United Kingdom asked if British taxpayers were on the list, and officials in Paris turned over several thousand names. That May, police in Italy announced that they had received details about Italian account holders. The scandal unfolded while Italy’s Prime Minister at the time, Silvio Berlusconi, was being investigated for tax fraud, and leaks to the press revealed that many prominent Italians were on the list, from a Roman princess to the jeweller Gianni Bulgari. The Italian press called it the elenco della vergogna—the list of shame.
French authorities also shared portions of the list with Argentina, Russia, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and India (where the hidden funds were described as “black money”). Scandals erupted in each country, but the biggest aftershock was felt in Greece, which was already suffering from the global economic crisis. In 2010, Christine Lagarde, then the French finance minister, shared two thousand names on Falciani’s list with her Greek counterpart, George Papaconstantinou. According to a study by scholars at the University of Chicago and Virginia Tech, in 2009 Greek taxpayers failed to declare as much as twenty-eight billion euros—roughly twelve per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. Greece had amassed a giant debt, and to reduce it Papaconstantinou had enacted severe austerity measures, cutting pensions and wages and raising taxes, even though many Greeks were in desperate financial straits. Yet, when Papaconstantinou learned the names of wealthy Greeks who were hiding their fortunes offshore, the government took no action.
In 2012, the Greek magazine Hot Doc published a version of the list. Papaconstantinou’s successor, Evangelos Venizelos, initially claimed ignorance. Then he announced that he had discovered a memory stick containing Falciani’s data in an office drawer, and had given it to authorities. When prosecutors requested a fresh copy of the Greek list, from Paris, and compared it with the data provided by Venizelos, they found that three names were missing from the memory stick. All were relatives of Papaconstantinou, who was convicted of tampering with the list and given a suspended sentence.
Although the Swiss government appears to have quickly understood the possible repercussions of the Falciani list, the management at H.S.B.C. was slow to comprehend the extent of its predicament. Alexandre Zeller, the head of the private bank in Switzerland, downplayed the data loss, claiming that only ten or so clients were affected. Zeller did not understand that the breach was of historic dimensions until December, 2009, when the French finally shared the complete list with the Swiss. H.S.B.C. executives were shocked when Falciani was subsequently hailed across Europe as the “Edward Snowden of banking,” in part because they had become convinced that he was something decidedly more sinister.
The Swiss Bankers Association, an industry group, maintains an international alert system that allows participating banks to issue security bulletins to other banks. The system is monitored by Swiss police, and in February, 2008, an officer noticed a posting from a woman named Samira Harb, who worked at Bank Audi, in Lebanon. Harb explained that she had recently met with a man who was looking to sell a database containing what appeared to be private-client information from a Swiss bank. In a subsequent interview with Swiss authorities, Harb said that she had been taken aback by the man’s presentation, and had pointed out to him that “my name could have been on the list if I had an account.” The man was aggressive. Opening a Mac laptop, he showed her a spreadsheet containing account numbers, addresses, and job titles. When Harb asked him how he had obtained this information, he was evasive, saying that he had used “I.T. techniques.” Harb declined the man’s offer, but held on to his business card. It identified him as Ruben al-Chidiak. He was travelling with an associate—a Lebanese woman named Georgina Mikhael.
In Bern, a Swiss federal prosecutor named Laurence Boillat opened an investigation. There was no record of a Ruben al-Chidiak in Switzerland, and the name had a fictitious ring. But Georgina Mikhael was working at H.S.B.C. in Geneva. Boillat placed Mikhael under surveillance, including a wiretap on her cell phone. She did not appear to be communicating with Chidiak, but Boillat determined that she was having an affair with a married colleague—Hervé Falciani. Mikhael exchanged more than five hundred phone calls and text messages with Falciani. During an instant-message chat on Skype, she seemed to be asking about the transfer of client information onto a memory stick. “Have you committed a sin?” she wrote. “You have to be careful baby.”
Toward the end of 2008, the surveillance revealed that Mikhael was planning to leave her job and return to Beirut. Boillat and a team of investigators confronted Mikhael at her office. She immediately confirmed that Chidiak was actually Falciani, and pledged to coöperate.
Mikhael told the investigators that Falciani had intended to use his database not to expose tax evasion but to make money. They were in love, she explained. He told her that he wanted to leave Simona. “I thought that Hervé was serious, and that we could imagine a future together,” she said. But Falciani told her that he needed to raise money in order to finance a divorce. (Simona was aware of the relationship, Mikhael told the investigators, adding, “I don’t know if she knows the story of the data.”)
Private banks routinely attempt to poach wealthy clients. Mikhael told the investigators that she and Falciani had travelled to Beirut to sell the data on H.S.B.C. customers to another bank. Before departing, they had created a company, based in Hong Kong, named Palorva—a mashup of “Palomino,” which was Mikhael’s nickname, and “Hervé.” They set up a Web site and posted a motto: “Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence.” The Web site said that Palorva could help banks recruit new customers by scouring public databases for information.
Falciani felt that he should have an alias, Mikhael said. Wanting “a name that would be familiar to his Lebanese interlocutors,” he decided that Ruben al-Chidiak sounded plausibly Arab. They printed business cards—Chidiak was identified as Palorva’s “sales manager”—and in February, 2008, they flew to Lebanon, using Simona Falciani’s H.S.B.C. credit card to buy tickets. In addition to Bank Audi, they met with four other banks, but made no sales. According to Mikhael, Falciani travelled at all times with a can of mace and a knife. (He denies this, saying, “That’s not my style.”)
When I asked Falciani if he had an affair with Mikhael, he said yes, but added, “It was nothing special.” In Beirut, the couple strolled along the Corniche, and Mikhael introduced Falciani to her family. “Georgina thought we were going to settle in Lebanon,” Falciani subsequently testified in a deposition in France. “I let her think I had the same idea.” But once they returned to Switzerland the relationship soured. Mikhael noticed that each time a new young woman started working at the bank Falciani followed her around “exactly like he did with me.” Eventually, she told Swiss investigators, she “realized that he wasn’t ready to leave his wife.” At one point, she sent him an e-mail: “The deal we made doesn’t say that you should never call me!! Apparently you’ve been having great weekends.”
Falciani, it seems, had begun seeing other women. Later, when Swiss investigators analyzed his cell phone, they found a contact listed as “Myriam government.” Was this a liaison from a foreign-intelligence service? Was it someone from the Network? When they looked up the number and summoned the woman for an interview, they discovered that Myriam was a philosophy student and a part-time secretary from Geneva—“a romantic conquest” of Falciani’s, as one investigator put it. (Apparently, Falciani, mindful that his wife or his mistress might inspect his contact list, had added “government” to throw off suspicion.) Mikhael eventually concluded that Falciani was “a liar, a born manipulator, a seducer, a pickup artist.”
“I really prefer the quiet rhythms of the sewers to the hustle and bustle of the subways.” ShareTweetBuy a cartoon Falciani told me that he never intended to sell files in Beirut. On the contrary, he had known about the warning system maintained by the Swiss Bankers Association, and had set up meetings in Beirut with the express intention of triggering the alert system, in order to lure Swiss authorities into exposing H.S.B.C.’s criminality. “It was a trap,” he said.
Why fabricate a false identity? Falciani told me that his friends in the Network had developed suspicions about Georgina Mikhael and her sudden appearance in Geneva. “This girl was maybe not there only for her,” Falciani said. “She had no banking experience at all.”
“Whom did you think she was working for?” I asked.
Falciani cast a theatrical glance around Hippopotamus before leaning toward me and whispering, “It was Hezbollah.”
I looked at him with bewilderment. There were times when Falciani reminded me of Chuck Barris, the host of “The Gong Show,” who, in his 1984 memoir, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” claimed that he had secretly led a double life as a C.I.A. assassin. In order to determine whether Mikhael was a Hezbollah spy, Falciani said, he tested her by seeing if she had the means to secure him “a real fake identity”—a Lebanese passport and an identity card with a pseudonym. His actions sounded bizarre, Falciani allowed, but you had to understand that, during this period, dangerous people were coming to Geneva and taking a great interest in him. He said, “You have read about the kidnapping?”
One night in August, 2007, Falciani was walking in Geneva’s Champel district when a van suddenly pulled alongside him. Men inside the vehicle “threw me in, holding a gun to my head,” he recalled. “I found myself in the basement of a church, in front of two men. A big red-headed guy that speaks impeccable French and a super-tough brown-haired guy.” They were Mossad agents, and the Israeli government needed his assistance. An Islamist mole had apparently infiltrated H.S.B.C. Would he help expose the infiltrator? He accepted the mission.
At least, this is the version that Falciani told the French newspaper Nice Matin. When I pressed him about the episode, his story shifted. “My friends organized the kidnapping,” he said. It was staged by the Network.
So the kidnappers weren’t actually Mossad agents?
“It was real fake,” Falciani replied. “Like a real fake identity.” He conceded that, in the H.S.B.C. saga, “you have a lot of real fake things.” In 2010, Swiss prosecutors asked Mikhael about the Mossad story. “I’m convinced that this story is pure invention,” she said. She has initiated a defamation suit against Falciani in Paris, insisting that she is neither a terrorist nor a spy, and arguing that Falciani’s allegations are “worthy of a crime novel.” (Through a lawyer, Mikhael declined to speak with me, but the lawyer reiterated that she has never been a member of Hezbollah, noting that she is Christian.)
In Paris, I met with Christian Eckert, the French budget minister, who wrote a report on Falciani and his revelations. The French government has not only vaunted Falciani’s information; it has fought a significant international battle to protect him from prosecution by the Swiss. Eckert acknowledged that Falciani “has a tendency to romanticize his stories a little.” But he insisted that financial authorities had confirmed “the authenticity of the information that he gave.” Even if Falciani wasn’t always a reliable narrator, the French government had no buyer’s remorse. When I alluded to Georgina Mikhael’s contention that Falciani is merely a con man and a common thief, Eckert grimaced as if he’d swallowed a bad oyster, and muttered, “Salope”—the French word for “bitch.”
Until recently, it seemed impossible to shame the Swiss into breaking their tradition of banking secrecy. In the nineteen-nineties, when U.S. investigators came looking for looted assets that had been stolen from Jews during the Second World War, the Swiss government stonewalled. But by 2012 Falciani’s revelations and other pressures threatened to overwhelm the Swiss resistance to transparency. In 2010, the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring banks overseas to submit to the I.R.S. the names and account details of American clients. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, meanwhile, amended a convention on mutual administrative assistance in tax matters so that Swiss banks could be obligated to divulge client information. In February, 2012, prosecutors in New York indicted Wegelin & Company, the oldest bank in Switzerland, for money laundering and abetting tax evasion. The bank was effectively put out of business. Chancellor Angela Merkel infuriated Swiss officials when she announced that the German government would happily pay a Swiss bank employee who was offering to sell information about secret accounts held by German taxpayers. “If these data are relevant, we should aim to get hold of them,” she said. This established a frightening precedent for Swiss banks. Oswald Grübel, the chief executive of U.B.S., said, “If governments are in the market of buying illegal data, that changes the world.”
On June 30, 2012, Falciani travelled to the southern port of Sète, where he boarded a Morocco-bound ferry that would make a stop in Spain. His reasons for going to Spain have never been clear. I heard a rumor in Paris that there was a woman there. But Falciani, characteristically, offered me a more intriguing explanation. During the summer of 2012, the U.S. Senate concluded the investigation revealing that H.S.B.C. had engaged in money laundering and facilitated the operations of Mexican drug cartels. According to Falciani, he had been an instrumental source for this investigation, and he was advised by supporters in the U.S. government to leave France. “There was a lot of risk in that period for people to kill me,” Falciani told me. (A staff member who was involved in the Senate inquiry told me that Falciani was not a source for the investigation.)
Early the next morning, the ferry arrived in Barcelona. When Falciani disembarked and presented his passport to Spanish immigration officials, he was arrested. He had been safe in Paris, because he had a French passport and France rarely extradites its own citizens. But Switzerland had issued a Red Notice—an international arrest warrant—with Interpol, and the Spanish elected to honor it. This placed Spanish authorities in a slightly awkward position, given that in 2010 they had requested Falciani’s list from the French. Madrid tax inspectors had subsequently conducted a series of investigations into prominent Spaniards who had used H.S.B.C. to mask their wealth. Emilio Botín, the head of Banco Santander, was exposed as an account holder and was obliged, along with other members of his family, to pay nearly three hundred million dollars in back taxes.
Falciani hired a lawyer to challenge the extradition. Pending the resolution of his case, he was sent to Valdemoro prison, south of Madrid. Falciani was cavalier about this interlude, telling me, “It’s tough for my family, you know, but I’m kind of Superman—for me, it’s O.K.” He passed the days playing racquetball with members of eta, the Basque terrorist group. A priest loaned him a book about Julian Assange, which he read with great interest.
At an extradition hearing in April, 2013, Falciani appeared in thick glasses and a preposterous brown wig. The disguise was for his own safety, he explained in his memoir: “My only fear was that someone might take me out before my arrival at the court.” In arguing that he should not be returned to Switzerland, Falciani volunteered to assist the Spanish government in its battle against tax fraud, saying, “The fight for financial transparency is fundamental.” A month later, a Spanish court ruled against extradition. Because the principle of bank secrecy does not exist in Spanish law, the court argued, violating that secrecy in Switzerland was not a crime in Spain.
“This detergent sucks.” NOVEMBER 22, 2004 ShareTweetBuy a cartoon Falciani insists that the five and a half months he spent in the Spanish jail was part of his grand design. “I knew I would be imprisoned,” he told me. “But I had to flee the threats that I was exposed to and take up the fight against financial secrecy.” But why would Spain be safer than France? Visibly impatient with my failure to grasp his logic, he said, “Because I would be in jail.”
Upon his release, Falciani returned to France, where he was given police protection. Montgolfier, the prosecutor in Nice, told Le Temps that Swiss attempts to discredit Falciani should be dismissed. “No one seems to doubt what we have in our hands,” he said. “We cannot question the data.” Falciani told me that his house had been broken into and that, as a consequence of his notoriety, Simona, who had remained in Italy with Kim, was fired from her job as a clerk in a shoe store. In interviews, he has adopted a tone of menace toward his antagonists. “I have become more dangerous,” he told Le Monde, in 2013.
The French government says that it has never paid Falciani for his information, and he denies having been paid by any of the governments that have used his data to pursue tax cheats. But, if Falciani had been compensated, such a transaction would not be without precedent. In 2006, a former employee of L.G.T. Group, a private bank in Liechtenstein, offered the details of hundreds of accounts to German intelligence services—and received a reported five million euros in return. Some German officials voiced discomfort with the quid pro quo, and with Angela Merkel’s endorsement of such deals. Kurt Lauk, the president of the business council of the Christian Democrats, said, “We are signalling to these data thieves: We will buy what you steal.”
Georgina Mikhael has observed of Falciani, “He has an enormous imagination. Overflowing.” His outlandish stories about secret agents and a network of hackers opposed to tax evasion seem like the fantasies of a paranoiac or the ramblings of a fabulist. But in March, 2008, before fleeing Geneva, he had sent e-mails to British and German intelligence agencies, announcing, “I have the whole list of clients of one of the world’s top five private banks.” (The agencies did not pursue this opportunity.) He also contacted a French revenue inspector named Jean-Patrick Martini. During the summer of 2008, Falciani arranged a secret meeting with Martini in a French village across the Swiss border. Martini brought along a psychologist, who helped him come to the conclusion that Falciani seemed credible about the provenance of his data.
In a subsequent deposition, Martini testified, “He said there had been fraud, that the bank was complicit in a fair number of irregularities, and that it was important to put a stop to it. I always had the conviction that he was acting out of pure civic duty.” After Falciani crossed into France in December, 2008, he met Martini again, at a café in the Nice airport, and turned over CDs containing the H.S.B.C. data. When Montgolfier and his team raided the apartment of Falciani’s parents, they did not realize that another French official already possessed a copy of the list.
Georgina Mikhael has said that Falciani’s overtures to foreign governments were simply a hedge on his efforts to sell the data: if he failed to make a deal with a bank, he would seek a buyer in the intelligence community. He was aware that Germany had paid millions to the leaker from L.G.T. Group, the Liechtenstein bank. In “Falciani’s Tax Bomb,” a 2015 documentary by the British filmmaker Ben Lewis, Mikhael says that it was the Liechtenstein deal that “gave him the idea to sell the data to secret services.” Of course, someone can have a desire to expose wrongdoing and also want to be rewarded for his trouble. Government agreements with whistle-blowers often look morally confused. In 2009, Bradley Birkenfeld, the American banker who leaked documents about illegal activity at U.B.S., was sent to prison for his role in the conspiracy. He served two and a half years. (Though U.B.S. paid a fine, no other executive went to jail for the misconduct that Birkenfeld exposed.) Upon Birkenfeld’s release, he received a government reward of a hundred and four million dollars—the largest ever paid by the I.R.S.
In airport terminals around the world, H.S.B.C. posts advertisements that emphasize its reach across continents and cultures. An image appears twice, with different captions: a tattooed arm is labelled “trendy” in one picture and “traditional” in the next, suggesting that the cosmopolitan traveller needs a global bank that grasps differences in cultural perception. As Falciani’s fortunes rose and fell, we kept in touch through Skype, and I often thought of those ads. In France, Falciani looked like a whistle-blower; in Switzerland, he looked like a thief. “I was taken in by his charm,” Mikhael says in the documentary. “But I am still amazed that the whole world has been charmed by him.” In December, 2014, Swiss prosecutors indicted Falciani for industrial espionage and data theft. After the charges were announced, he seemed unruffled. He couldn’t understand why anyone questioned the purity of his motives. “I did everything straight,” he told me.
One day in early 2014, someone dropped off a memory stick at the reception desk of Le Monde, in Paris. It contained a copy of Falciani’s data. Until that point, bits of the list had become public, but no media outlet possessed a complete copy. Overwhelmed by the amount of information, the editors of Le Monde joined with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to comb through it. In February, 2015, the project, SwissLeaks, resulted in dozens of articles in newspapers around the world.
The novelty and importance of the list lay more in its magnitude than in its confirmation of individual venality. Nevertheless, it was bracing to put human faces—many of them famous—on the story. The Guardian and other SwissLeaks participants revealed that the Falciani list included politicians, arms dealers, and people linked to terrorist financing and to the trade in blood diamonds. Stuart Gulliver, the C.E.O. of H.S.B.C., acknowledged that the list had become “a source of shame.”
Exposed clients sometimes offered comical responses. The French chef Paul Bocuse said that he had “forgotten” about an account containing 2.2 million euros. David Bowie explained to the Guardian that although he lived in Manhattan, he had been a legal resident of Switzerland since 1976. One person whose name ended up on the list, John Malkovich, sued Le Monde, saying that he has never had an undeclared account at H.S.B.C.
There were serious consequences for a few of the named clients. For example, a French court sentenced Arlette Ricci, the seventy-three-year-old heiress to the Nina Ricci fortune, to a year in prison for tax fraud. But the vast majority of people identified as holding undeclared accounts were not prosecuted. Instead, they appear to have settled with their respective governments, in a series of quiet amnesties.
Nearly three thousand accounts were held by U.S. taxpayers. When I met with Christian Eckert, the French budget minister, he showed me official documentation indicating that in early 2010 U.S. authorities had requested French assistance in securing the American names on the list. In May, 2012, four I.R.S. agents and a prosecutor from the Department of Justice flew to Paris and interrogated Falciani about his database. “I remain at your disposal,” he said, according to a transcript of the meeting.
“Over here, stupid.” JANUARY 24, 2005 ShareTweetBuy a cartoon The Department of Justice declined to comment on its questioning of Falciani, and the I.R.S. denied my request, under the Freedom of Information Act, for details about its possible use of the list to pursue tax violators. But, in 2009, the I.R.S. introduced a plan allowing U.S. citizens with undeclared accounts to volunteer the details to the government and pay outstanding taxes, without fear of criminal penalties. I.R.S. officials maintain that they have collected more than eight billion dollars through this program, and it stands to reason that some people who settled in this fashion were on Falciani’s list. Indeed, there is evidence that U.S. authorities have used the list to pursue cases against American taxpayers.
According to an affidavit in a federal case against a New Jersey couple, Eli and Renee Chabot, the government received a CD in April, 2010, containing a portion of Falciani’s list, and the data revealed that the Chabots had several million dollars at H.S.B.C. Switzerland, in accounts associated with a company called Pelsa Business, Inc. The Chabots refused to turn over information to the I.R.S. about the accounts. Last year, an appeals court held that this was not a permissible invocation of the Fifth Amendment. But the case against them may face complications. In the Falciani documentary, Victor Song, a former enforcement officer at the I.R.S., says that a determination was made by the Department of Justice that Falciani’s information would be inadmissible in U.S. courts, because it had been “stolen from a bank in Europe.”
Last November, at a federal court in Bellinzona, Switzerland, a prosecutor named Carlo Bulletti argued that Falciani was no crusader. “The whole construct of the White Knight is a tissue of lies,” he said. Falciani was being tried in absentia, for industrial espionage and data theft. A former supervisor of Falciani’s testified that he had grumbled about the cost of living in Geneva and complained about his salary, which never exceeded a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Laurent Moreillon, a lawyer for H.S.B.C., called Falciani a “data robber” and noted that the breach had been devastating for the bank, had created embarrassment for account holders, and had precipitated numerous divorces.
Falciani’s attorney, Marc Henzelin, denied that his client had attacked a financial fortress. The data practically “fell into his pocket,” leaving Falciani feeling “troubled” by the vulnerability of the bank’s internal software. Henzelin acknowledged that the trip to Beirut wasn’t a “very glorious episode,” but he suggested that Falciani had overplayed the intrigue. “All this is part of a movie script, but not very serious,” he insisted. Falciani had gone to Lebanon to sell data, Henzelin said, but only with material harvested from the Internet. “There is no indication that the data he wanted to sell in Beirut were precisely data from H.S.B.C. Switzerland,” Henzelin argued.
The prosecution claimed that the privacy of thousands of honorable clients had been violated, but, as Henzelin pointed out, this was hard to reconcile with the damning particulars of the list. Of six hundred and twenty-eight Indian names on the list, only seventy-nine had declared their assets to the Indian government. The proportion was similar for Argentina and Greece. Gabriel Zucman, the economist, estimates that eighty per cent of assets in offshore havens are undeclared. Tax evasion wasn’t incidental to H.S.B.C.’s Swiss bank, Henzelin concluded; it was the bank’s raison d’être.
Switzerland has been hard on those who violate bank secrecy: Rudolf Elmer, a former employee of the Swiss bank Julius Bär, was tried in 2011 for sharing information about tax evasion and other improprieties with WikiLeaks. Elmer was imprisoned for two hundred days, some of it in solitary confinement; he says that his family was harassed by detectives working for the bank. In Swiss society, to violate the covenant of secrecy is to risk not just prison but also ostracism.
During the trial, Falciani taunted prosecutors by speaking at a conference in Divonne, a French spa town a mile from the Swiss border. The subject of the conference was “Investigative Journalism in the Time of WikiLeaks.” Falciani arrived unshaven, his dark hair slicked back, dressed in a black blazer and jeans. He had a tan, and as flashbulbs popped he had the self-conscious demeanor of a movie star at a première. “My action continues to be fruitful,” Falciani declared. “I’m working with administrations and investigators.” Although he had remained in France, he had joined a new Spanish political party, Partido X, and stood for election in the European Parliament, in 2014, on an anticorruption-and-transparency platform. (The Party won no seats.) He was also promoting “Earthquake on Planet Finance,” in which he related his adventures and called for greater accountability in the international financial system.
The book is an extraordinary document. Falciani writes that the Network consists of “about 100 people working toward the same objective.” He claims that while he was fleeing Switzerland he was contacted by Network operatives on a keyboardless phone, “white in color and the size of a credit card, so slim that one could hide it in the pages of a book.” The device sounds like something Apple will be selling a decade from now, but Falciani describes it as proprietary Network technology. In Beirut, he “was always running the risk of being kidnapped.” In Spain, powerful enemies could have “faked an accident to eliminate me.” He describes secret meetings on railway platforms and bodyguards who watch over him so discreetly that nobody but Falciani ever seems to notice them.
At a press conference, a reporter asked Falciani how Simona had coped with his troubles. “She is courageous, she has never failed,” he said, adding, “I never had any mistresses.” Noting that he no longer lived with his family, he initially called it “a life-style choice,” then explained that he was trying to protect their safety. “We communicate by Skype,” he said. The hotel where the event took place was also a casino, and Falciani seemed at ease there. A few days later, in Bellinzona, the attorneys and the presiding judge spent the morning debating whether, in light of Falciani’s decision to boycott his own trial, his remarks in Divonne were admissible in lieu of testimony. (They were not.)
On November 27, 2015, Falciani was convicted of aggravated industrial espionage, and sentenced to five years in prison. H.S.B.C. released a statement celebrating the verdict, and noted that the bank “has always maintained that Falciani systematically stole clients’ information in order to sell it.” It was the harshest sentence ever delivered in Switzerland for the violation of bank secrecy, but the authorities were clearly waging a rearguard battle. Marc Henzelin, Falciani’s attorney, noted that his client was being prosecuted while Switzerland succumbed to international pressure to dismantle bank secrecy altogether. “It is not Falciani who is being judged,” Henzelin said. “It is Switzerland.” Eckert, the French budget minister, told me, “I think the Swiss are now convinced that secret banking doesn’t have much of a future.”
The French are pursuing a criminal case against H.S.B.C. over the Falciani revelations, and have indicted the bank for direct marketing to nationals, money laundering, and facilitating tax fraud. But in Switzerland authorities dropped an investigation of H.S.B.C. after the bank agreed to apologize for “organizational deficiencies” and pay a conspicuously manageable fine of forty-three million dollars. (Last year, H.S.B.C.’s net profits exceeded thirteen billion dollars.) When I asked Birkenfeld, the former U.B.S. banker, about the penalty H.S.B.C. paid in Switzerland, he laughed. “I had friends who worked at H.S.B.C. who handled accounts that were larger than that,” he said. The system is rigged, Birkenfeld said: “The Swiss government can’t investigate the bank. They would be investigating themselves!”
A few days after Falciani’s sentencing, I visited Geneva. The city felt scrubbed and prosperous. As dusk fell, neon signs bearing the logos of Swiss banks and watch companies glowed over the lake, which looked as clear as glass.
“You’re a lucky man—a little bit to the left and you’d be a goner.” JUNE 27, 2005 ShareTweetBuy a cartoon H.S.B.C. had recently relocated from an old lakeside palace that it inherited from Edmond Safra to a row of handsome whitewashed buildings. No executives would meet with me, but a beleaguered-seeming British press spokesman escorted me through a series of sleek glass interiors to a conference room on a high floor, and assured me that the bank has changed. H.S.B.C. has nearly tripled its number of compliance officers, to nine thousand, and has ceased operations in a dozen countries. “The number of accounts has been managed down,” he said.
Where will the profits that H.S.B.C. is forfeiting go? To other banks, he said, or other countries. Money has a tendency to move, and Switzerland is hardly the only tax haven. If it becomes impractical to hide fortunes there, the money could migrate to Singapore, or, for that matter, to America. Shruti Shah, the vice-president of Transparency International U.S.A., recently found that in such states as Delaware and Nevada it is easier to establish an anonymous shell company than it is to obtain a library card. It seems unlikely that reforming the Swiss banking sector will diminish the widespread practice of tax evasion, because wealthy clients can simply transfer their money to a more lax jurisdiction or convert their cash to art or gold or some other easily laundered asset. The Times recently observed that fighting tax evasion by striking deals with an individual banking haven is like “plugging one hole in a colander.”
Whether the culture at H.S.B.C. has actually changed is open to debate. After the bank was implicated in servicing drug cartels and sanctioned regimes, the U.S. Justice Department appointed an independent monitor to assess H.S.B.C.’s efforts at reform. Last summer, the monitor reported that employees continued to display a lack of coöperation with internal audits. Managers maintained the same approach to in-house compliance: “discredit, deny, deflect, and delay.”
Sue Shelley, the former compliance chief in Luxembourg, began her career at Midland Bank in Liverpool when she was a teen-ager, ripping up old checkbooks. After Midland merged with H.S.B.C., in 1992, she created a compliance department for H.S.B.C.’s operation in the Cayman Islands. She arrived in Luxembourg in 2009, and was struck by the lax precautions at the private bank—and by its reaction to the Falciani leak. “The steps that I saw taken were more about protecting data, making it harder for employees to take data out, than they were about the underlying issue, which was tax evasion,” she told me. In a series of reports, Shelley raised concerns to management and the board of directors about suspicious clients and transactions, and about the permissive culture at the bank. In response, Shelley said, she was “bullied, isolated, and ignored.” By 2013, she had become consumed by stress, feeling that she was both aggravating superiors with her warnings and failing to catch other irregularities. Shelley had what she describes as “a bit of a nervous breakdown.” While she was home recuperating, H.S.B.C. fired her, without explanation. Shelley, who had been at the bank for thirty-six years, believes that she was fired because she refused to ignore compliance issues. In 2014, she won an improper-termination lawsuit. Her story echoes that of Carolyn Wind, who oversaw compliance and money-laundering prevention for H.S.B.C.’s U.S. operations, and was fired in 2007. Wind told a Senate subcommittee that she lost her job because she had pushed for “additional compliance resources.”
This spring, the Falciani list was dwarfed by the Panama Papers leak. An anonymous source released eleven and a half million documents relating to the practices of Mossack Fonseca, exposing the financial dealings of a dozen current and former heads of state, and underscoring how extensively the global élite uses shell companies and tax havens to obscure its wealth. The leak documented that H.S.B.C. and its subsidiaries had created some twenty-three hundred shell companies that had been registered by Mossack Fonseca. According to a Guardian report, H.S.B.C. helped to keep open the Swiss bank accounts of Rami Makhlouf, the financier cousin of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, after hostilities in Syria intensified. (Makhlouf’s family has been blacklisted by the U.S. government since 2007.)
Last winter, several senior H.S.B.C. executives were summoned to a committee of the House of Commons, in London, to address improprieties. Asked why no top executives had been fired after the recent string of scandals, Douglas Flint, the group chairman, said that he was “a great supporter of individual responsibility” but felt that, in this instance, it would be inappropriate “for a single individual to be responsible.” Gulliver, the C.E.O., said that since taking over, in 2011, he had implemented “root and branch” reforms. But it was hard to see him as an agent of change. When committee members inquired how he chose to receive his personal compensation from the bank, Gulliver acknowledged that for many years he was paid through an anonymous shell company that he had set up in Panama—through Mossack Fonseca.
Gulliver insisted that he had always paid his taxes, and that he employed the Panamanian shell simply for “privacy.” But he admitted his “inability to convince anyone that these arrangements were not put in place for reasons of tax evasion.”
Falciani remains in Paris, and the week the Panama Papers were released I spoke with him over Skype. He welcomed the leak, he told me, but he was dubious about the prospects of broader change. The banking industry, he said, will make the minimum reforms necessary in order to quell outrage. Then executives will figure out how to game the new regulatory environment. Bankers, Falciani observed, have a great “ability to adapt.”
He mentioned the huge sum that Bradley Birkenfeld had been awarded for blowing the whistle on U.B.S., and said that France needed to follow America’s lead and create incentives for whistle-blowers. Falciani seemed a bit glum, and it struck me that one problem with adopting the vestments of a transparency advocate in order to stay out of a Swiss prison cell is that you are obliged to keep wearing them. I asked Falciani if it had been worth it to upend his life. He hesitated, then said yes. “It used to be that when people thought of Switzerland it was chocolate, watches, and rich people,” he said. “Now it is also corruption.” ♦
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quote:Originally posted by mena7: I agree ish Gebor the quality of life in Sweden for its population is one of the highest in the world. The average labor cost in Sweden is $59 and in the USA is $44.52. There are now a lot of new Muslim immigrants from Syria and other countries causing problems to the Swedish socialist government.
I disagree with Santo Bonacci when he stated the Vatican, the Jesuit and the Black Nobilty are running the world now. I think Anglo Saxon banking and royal families from the UK, USA, Germany are running the world. The Vatican, the Jesuit and Black nobility are junior partners. There is a saying the money man run the world and who has the gold rule. The owners of the biggest banks and corporations in the World are not Italians or Jesuits. The owners of the biggest banks and corporations in the world are Anglo Saxon British and Americans.
The Roman Catholic bankers have been bad bankers in history. The roman Catholic Church was against the payment of interest. Roman Catholic countries like Spain and Portugal during the colonial era stole tons of gold and silver coins from Latin America who were mined by Native Americans and Africans slave labors but 200 years after the colonization of Latin Americ Spain was bankrupted. The Anglo Saxon people after they have moved form Venice, the Iberian peninsula to the Netherlands and then to England created the Bank of England in the 17 cent CE and took over control of the world financial system and the world trade.
Man is a sexual animal, a man will get aroused sexually just by seeing the buttock and the breasts of a woman walking. A man who is not having sex can become a psychopath. The ROMAN Catholic have 414,313 priests who are celibate, not having sex and not having wives and children to love. Because of that I think a lot of Catholic priest are hypocrite sexually fustrated psychopaths. I think celibacy of priesthood is a form of sorcery. Thats why the Roman Catholic Church and priests were behind The genocide of the Native Americans, The African slave trades, the burning of women call witches and the raping of young boys all over the world that is still going on unpunished in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. those so call representent of God on Earth LOL.
Remember what happened to John Paul I, the Smiling Pope who was rumored to have been intent on investigating the Vatican Bank?
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1 US dollar will buy your around 0.98 Swiss Franc, so the swiss amf franc comes in as the first currency to be higher value than the US dollar. This, however, is no surprise given that Switzerland is one of the most stable and wealthy countries in the world.
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Switzerland 
The skull and bones is also the symbol and the name of a USA secret society.
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