Credit Suisse has helped more than 22 Americans evade taxes. This was supported by the permanent sub-committee on Investigations headed by the United States Senate, specifying that the sum hidden from the tax authorities amounts to 10 billion dollars, approximately double the amount previously calculated.
In many cases, the fraud starts with false declarations for visa applications, then passes through the creation of corporate boxes in tax havens and the reduction of transactions below 10 dollars, a threshold beyond which the US government would be suspicious. Naturally, at the end of each operation, the Bank's employees destroyed stacks of documents to cover their tracks.
Furthermore, Credit Suisse had created an office at Zurich airport (because American clients did not want to enter the city: they went to Switzerland to ski), where the accounts of over 10 American clients were registered. The bankers who worked in this office from 2002 to 2008 made as many as 150 trips to the United States.
According to the US authorities, the Swiss banking giant has been carrying out these practices for years now, sometimes with rather adventurous methods. One customer reports being guided “to an elevator controlled from the outside, devoid of buttons and floors. The meeting with the banker took place in a bare conference room”.
To date, the US Department of Justice has managed to obtain only 238 names of potential tax evaders, but it aims to achieve the same results obtained with UBS in 2008, when it forced the most important Swiss bank to reveal thousands of names and pay 780 million in fines for having allowed US citizens to evade taxes.
Finally, the report of the American sub-commission (176 pages long) states that there are approximately 1.800 Credit Suisse employees involved in this type of operation. Of these, only ten were sanctioned. No one has ever been fired.
