US senators criticise Credit Suisse over Nazi-linked accounts probe

© Keystone / Michael Buholzer

A committee of US senators on Tuesday said Credit Suisse deliberately hampered an investigation into Nazi assets last year that claimed the bank had serviced “scores” of undisclosed accounts. Credit Suisse defended its internal review.

Credit Suisse commissioned a probe in 2020 into allegations by the Simon Wiesenthal Center human rights organisation that the bank held potential Nazi-linked accounts and failed to disclose them, even during Holocaust-related probes decades earlier.

A confidential report by the bank’s own former ombudsman, subpoenaed and releasedExternal link by the US Senate Budget committee on Tuesday, said that despite public assurances, Credit Suisse in effect decided in June last year to “walk away from its commitment” to thoroughly investigate its former Nazi clients.

“Multiple reports shine a new light on Credit Suisse’s historical servicing of Nazi clients and Nazi-linked accounts, which in some cases continued until as recently as 2020,” the Senate committee stated.

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However, the multi-year investigation commissioned by Credit Suisse was “hampered by restrictions” and the bank “inexplicably terminated” an independent reviewer overseeing it, the committee said.

The “information we’ve obtained shows the bank established an unnecessarily rigid and narrow scope and refused to follow new leads uncovered during the course of the review,” Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said in a statement.

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Credit Suisse defendedExternal link its internal review in a statement, saying that the two-year probe turned up no evidence to support key claims from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) that dormant accounts serviced by Credit Suisse held assets from Holocaust victims.

“Investigators found no evidence to support the SWC’s allegations that many individuals on an Argentine list of 12,000 names had accounts at Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (SKA), Credit Suisse’s predecessor bank, during the Nazi period. The investigation also found no evidence that eight long closed accounts identified in this period contained assets from any Holocaust victims,” it said.

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Credit Suisse added that the research confirmed the conclusions reached by the Bergier Commission that investigated and settled matters pertaining to Swiss banks’ links to Nazi Germany in the late 1990s.

But the Senate committee said more work needs to be done to track down the value of assets of certain accounts held by Nazis at the bank in the post-1945 period.

The committee said in a statement it had opened its own investigation after receiving “credible allegations of potential wrongdoing” related to the internal probe, including the termination of the ombudsman overseeing it.

A spokesperson for the ombudsman, Neil Barofsky, declined to comment. His reportExternal link, which the committee obtained via a subpoena, found many questions were left “unanswered” after Credit Suisse decided to halt the review.

Credit Suisse said it was fully co-operating with the inquiry by the Senate committee, but that Barofsky’s report contained “numerous factual errors, misleading and gratuitous statements and unsupported allegations that are based on an incomplete understanding of the facts. The bank strongly rejects these misrepresentations”.