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Swiss bank data ‘thief’ warned of death threat

A former HSBC employee fighting extradition to Switzerland for allegedly stealing banking data that exposed thousands of suspected tax dodgers says US officials advised him to flee to Spain because his life was at risk.

Swiss bank data 'thief' warned of death threat
Hervé Falciani at recent court hearing near Madrid. Photo: Juan Carlos Hidalgo/Pool/AFP

Hervé Falciani, a 40-year-old French-Italian citizen, was arrested in Barcelona in July 2012 after he arrived by boat from the port of Sète in France.

He was apprehended under an international warrant seeking his extradition to Switzerland, where he is wanted for violating banking secrecy laws.
   
He collected data on at least 24,000 customers of HSBC's Swiss subsidiaries 
from 2006 to 2008 while he worked in the bank's information technology development unit in Geneva.

He then passed on the information to French authorities.

The files, which were subsequently relayed by French investigators to their counterparts in the United States, Spain, Italy and several other European Union countries, led to a raft of prosecutions.
   
Falciano told daily newspaper El Pais that about a month before he fled to 
Spain, US justice officials who he was collaborating with from Paris warned him that his life was at risk.
   
"The United States warned me that it would be easy for someone to pay to 
try to kill me," he said, according to a report published on Sunday.

"I had to plan my escape carefully," Falciano said.

"I chose Spain knowing that I would go to jail and that Switzerland would ask for my extradition," he said.
   
"I had two options: start a new life in the United States or travel 
somewhere else to gain time," Falciano said.

"They told me that the only safe place in Europe would be Spain, which had used my information with success in important cases.

"They thought it would be very unlikely that Spain would approve my extradition to Switzerland."

Spanish prosecutors opposed Falciani's extradition to Switzerland during his court hearing on April 15th in Madrid.

The court is expected to give its decision in the coming weeks.
   
Falciani told the court in Madrid last week his intention was to raise the 
alarm about what was going on at the bank and denied he sought to sell the information as alleged by Swiss officials.
   
In December, Spain's High Court ordered Falciani's release from jail pending 
his extradition hearing after the Spanish authorities argued Falciani was cooperating with authorities in several European countries in investigations into tax evasion, money-laundering, corruption and terrorism financing.

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BUSINESS

HSBC to pay France €300million to avoid tax fraud trial

HSBC Private Bank, a Swiss unit of banking giant HSBC, has agreed to pay 300 million euros ($352 million) to avoid going to trial in France for enabling tax fraud, prosecutors said Tuesday.

HSBC to pay France €300million to avoid tax fraud trial
Photo: AFP

HSBC was accused last year of helping French clients to hide at least 1.67 billion euros from the tax authorities, according to a source close to the probe.

The deal struck between the financial crime prosecutor's office and the bank is a first in France under a new procedure that allows companies under
suspicion of corruption or dissimulation of tax fraud to negotiate a fine to stop a case from going to trial.

The deal does not include a guilty plea.

French prosecutors have now dropped the case against HSBC Holdings.

The case against HSBC was opened back in 2015 and was over an alleged global tax-dodging scheme that helped hundreds of French nationals and pothers around the world evade the tax man.

Investigators believe that HSBC's private banking division offered its customers several ways of hiding assets from the French taxman, notably via the use of offshore tax havens.

The banking giant was at first accused of failing in its supervisory role over its private banking division, but further investigation led to suspicions
that HSBC “participated actively in the fraudulent practices”, the source close to the investigation said.

The probe named the former chief executive of the bank's Swiss private banking arm, Peter Braunwalder, and another executive, Judah Elmaleh.

The case began when French authorities in late 2008 received files stolen by Herve Falciani, a former HSBC employee, whose disclosures sparked the so-called “Swissleaks” scandal on bank-supported tax evasion.

The French-Italian national — dubbed by some media as “The Edward Snowden of banking” — leaked a cache of documents allegedly indicating that HSBC helped more than 120,000 clients of a number of nationalities to hide 180.6 billion euros from tax authorities between November 2006 and March 2007.

He was sentenced in absentia in November in Switzerland to five years in prison. The leaked files led to investigations by tax authorities in several European countries including, in addition to France, Spain and Belgium.