Word: chiasso
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With secrecy came abuse. The Swiss themselves were so startled by revelations in 1977 about rogue activities at the Chiasso branch of Credit Suisse?whose managers allegedly funneled funds through an offshore trustee company, hiding losses from their supervisors?that a new age of tougher bank regulation was ushered in. First came due-diligence rules that compelled banks to identify all their clients and establish the beneficial owners of assets. For over two decades now, banks have been obliged to keep a copy of some official identification of a client, like a passport?a measure that U.S. banks are only...
Much of the electronic money zips into a secret banking industry that got its start in Switzerland in the 1930s as worried Europeans began shifting their savings beyond the reach of Hitler's Third Reich. Later the country's infamous numbered accounts became a hugely profitable business. Chiasso, a quaint Swiss town of 8,700 inhabitants on the Italian border, has 18 banking offices. But during the past few years, Swiss secrecy has been weakened by a series of cases involving money laundering. Switzerland is now preparing a new law that will make money laundering a crime punishable by prison...
...referendum grew out of a scandal seven years ago involving foreign deposits. An officer at a Crédit Suisse branch in Chiasso, near the Italian border, was convicted of illegally diverting more than $800 million in customer funds into speculative investments. Most of the money had come from Italians seeking a haven from inflation and high tax rates...
Last March, Crédit Suisse belatedly decided to dispatch a special team, of investigators to Chiasso. What they found, as Chairman Aeppli delicately described it later, was that "contacts between the Chiasso branch and Texon ... were of a completely different nature than we had thought." Kuhrmeier and two assistants were arrested, along with three lawyers from next door. Crédit Suisse's then president Heinz Wuffli resigned, along with two other top company officials...
...management at Crédit Suisse chose to overlook some astonishingly clear signals that all was not well at their Chiasso branch. In January 1976, for example, Philippe de Weck, chairman of the Union Bank of Switzerland, showed Crédit Suisse a copy of a bank guarantee, improperly issued on fiduciary deposits, that had been channeled to Texon. Questioned about the violation, Kuhrmeier explained it away by saying, "It was a special favor that had to be done for a friend...