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Narayan Lakshman

Washington: United States banking giant Bank of America is scrambling to save itself from becoming the next institution to be exposed by WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that raised a storm by revealing secret State Department diplomatic cables.

Reports suggest BoA has appointed “a team of 15 to 20 top... officials, led by the chief risk officer, Bruce Thompson” to oversee wide-ranging internal investigations, covering thousands of documents and instances where computer files and security could have been compromised.

The BoA's actions came shortly after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hinted in an interview with the Forbes magazine over a month ago that his organisation would be releasing tens — possibly hundreds — of thousands of documents pertaining to “a big U.S. bank” that would expose an “ecosystem of corruption” within that bank.

In that interview, Mr. Assange also said the upcoming exposé would not only reveal flagrant violations of law and unethical practices, but also supply a vast number of documents describing the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos of the bank.

Even as far back as October Mr. Assange had indicated that WikiLeaks was “sitting on five gigabytes from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives”, in an interview with Computer World magazine.

The New York Times reported that the team at BoA had been joined by specialists from consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton and several top law firms to look into the legal problems that could arise from the disclosure.

BoA, along with a few other companies such as MasterCard and PayPal, had suspended processing payments to WikiLeaks on the grounds that WikiLeaks might have been in violation of the law by releasing the the State Department cables.

According to statements made in interviews, Mr. Assange expects to release the trove of documents relating to a U.S. bank “early this year”.