OCCRP

Wow. That’s a tough one for people who cover organized crime. We did a story on a medical examiner many years ago that used to offer families “murder or suicide or natural causes”. He also would come up with findings that matched whatever he needed – which was often in support of the government which was quite corrupt. There was a prosecuting judge who was working on a case about the local police being involved in drug trafficking. She was going to file charges. But then one night she died. Our corrupt medical examiner came up with the following ruling. He ruled that she came home. Made a hair appointment for the morning. Made dinner and ate it with her daughter. Packed for a trip the next evening. Picked up the garbage to take it outside. Opened the door. Leaned down and committed suicide by hand grenade. It was one of the most outrageous rulings I ever saw. He was promptly promoted to chief medical examiner in charge of war crimes cases. In another case, he used the old “floating couch” scenario. In order to prove that a bullet came from the door and not the window, he traced the bullet's path through a couch that was floating off the ground at a 45 degree angle in the middle of the room. It made no sense but not a word was mentioned. He is still working today I think. Crime does sometimes pay, at least in Bosnia and Herzegovina. - Drew Sullivan

The fact that Switzerland reversed course and adopted the sanctions is a very important move. ​​We don't know for sure how much money Putin personally has in Swiss bank accounts but we do know that some of his closest associates and backers, including the ones involved in the Magnitsky case, keep money in Swiss bank accounts. The Swiss National Bank estimated that more than $11 billion in Russian money were kept in Swiss banks in 2020. We’ve seen some of this money while investigating the Laundromats —large-scale money laundering operations that involved global banks. Besides the money, Switzerland also holds a lot of real estate for Russian officials and oligarchs while the Geneva Freeport is a storage place for some of the most expensive art in the world - some of it owned by Russian business people close to Putin. I should also point out to Sergey Roldugin, whom we exposed together with u/ICIJ as Putin’s moneyman, who used Swiss lawyers to create complex financial and business structures. Roldugin was just sanctioned himself and the combination of the Swiss sanctions and EU wide sanctions will hit these opaque structures, will impact Swiss law firms and might hurt a lot of high level business interests. Last but not least, Switzerland is a big hub for Russia’s oil trading activities so the impact will be felt there, as well. All of this will ultimately come home and hurt Putin’s standing with his oligarchs as well as Russia’s ability to avoid sanctions. — Paul Radu

We started from the premise that it’s not a crime to have a bank account, in Switzerland or anywhere else. Most of the 30,000+ account-holders in our data set probably did nothing wrong, and it would be journalistically and morally wrong for us to expose their private banking information. So we looked for cases where we felt that the public interest in exposing someone’s Swiss holdings *clearly* outweighed their right to privacy — because they were criminals, accused money launderers, or high-ranking politicians.

We also pursued stories about ongoing criminal cases involving corruption or money laundering, in which prosecutors or other authorities told us that not being able to “follow the money” was hurting their ability to investigate. For example, we did a story in Serbia about an accused drug lord known as Misha Banana. Prosecutors had known he had one Swiss bank account (which he used to launder millions of dollars’ worth of drug money), but had no idea about a second one we turned up. They said the new information would directly impact the case. We also wrote about Pakistani tax evaders, the children of an Azerbaijani strongman, and the family of Kazakhstan’s new president, who has publicly pledged to address wealth inequality but never mentioned his wife’s Swiss bank account.

There were lots of tough calls for us in this project, people who turned up in the data who were tantalizingly interesting, but we just couldn’t justify writing about. So we didn’t. Unlike with other projects based on big leaks, we decided not to do stories on celebrities, sports stars, actors, and people of that ilk. We don’t think it’s news that they’re rich. Above all, we tried to ensure that all the stories we pursued fed into the greater goal of illuminating the role that the Swiss banking sector plays in the global financial system — the fact that it’s the kind of place where strongmen, tax evaders, and drug lords like to keep their money. - Julia Wallace

KYC is crucial to a clean banking system, but efficient KYC needs to be done in a smart way and in concert with other big players in the banking systems. Criminals, corrupt politicians, and the scores of lawyers serving them devise very clever money laundering constructs and have a bird eye view of the vulnerabilities in the KYC processes. Without a constant sharing of criminal/money laundering patterns and without clear processes to match financial flows against business flows and the global trade in the physical world, KYC is rendered useless. — Paul Radu

We firmly believe that these investigations have an impact not only on the investigated entities and their countries, but also on the entire network that facilitates the concealment of financial assets. By focusing on a specific case, such as Credit Suisse, what you are doing is denouncing a system, banking secrecy, which facilitates the entry of criminal money into the ordinary financial system. Once again it is the demonstration that opaque systems — although they use the argument of privacy — introduce money of questionable origin into the legal financial system. These funds often come from dictatorships; that is, that money has been stolen from countries that need it. – Antonio Baquero