Elmer guilty of breaching bank secrecy laws: court

Zurich: A Swiss court on Wednesday found the former banker, Rudolf Elmer, who handed over secret data to the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks, guilty of breaching bank secrecy laws and handed down a suspended fine.

A judge said the 55-year-old former chief operating officer at private bank Julius Baer's subsidiary in the Cayman Islands was found guilty of seeking to blackmail the bank, making threats and violating banking secrecy laws.

Mr. Elmer was acquitted by the district court in Zurich of accusations of making a bomb hoax that were levelled by the public prosecutor.

Judge Sebastian Aeppli sentenced the former banker to a suspended fine of 7,200 Swiss francs (€ 5,500), noting that Mr. Elmer had “for years been a part of the banking world” and had “benefited” from this.

His motives in handing over a set of bank client data to WikiLeaks in 2007 were therefore not to fight tax evasion, but stemmed from his dismissal from Julius Baer five years earlier, said the judge.

Mr. Elmer claimed that he wanted the world to know the truth about money concealed in offshore accounts and tax evasion as well as the systems in place to keep it secret.

In court, he described the bank's activities as “immoral, not conforming with ethics.”

Defence lawyer Ganden Tethong Blattner said Swiss banking secrecy law was not applicable in the Cayman Islands, the banking haven where Mr. Elmer worked for the Julius Baer Banking and Trust Company.

However, public prosecutor Alexandra Bergmann contested the former banker's claim to be banking secrecy's whistleblower, arguing that he had only portrayed himself as such after he was dismissed. — AFP