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21 February 2022

Martin Cheek, managing director at SmartSearch said: “The leak is an alarming indictment of Credit Suisse’s apparent failure to carry out even the most rudimentary due diligence on clients.

“The scale of the corruption suggests this seems to go beyond just one or two bad eggs. This appears to be a complete business-wide failure and the consequences need to be severe.

“There is no real excuse for Credit Suisse to have failed to conduct proper due diligence, as the tools are there to prevent this from happening. If the bank had used electronic verification, it could have not only identified its clients in seconds, but also screened them against global sanctions and politically exposed persons lists.

“This would have prevented them harbouring the funds of – for instance – a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery or a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend.

“Large financial institutions often hide-behind the difficulties of moving away from ‘legacy’ systems, but with electronic verification available this can no longer be an excuse.”