US Legislators Press Beleaguered Bank Credit Suisse Over Nazi Accounts

US legislators have charged the beleaguered Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse with blocking an investigation into its historic assistance to former members of the Nazi regime.

On Tuesday, the Senate Banking Committee released two reports into the bank’s assistance to Nazi officials who fled to Argentina and other Latin American countries following World War II — one an independent report written by a lawyer who was fired while his investigation was ongoing, the other the bank’s own version of events.

“When it comes to investigating Nazi matters, righteous justice demands that we must leave no stone unturned,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said in a statement on Tuesday. “Credit Suisse has thus far failed to meet that standard.”

The controversy comes less than a month after Credit Suisse was saved from collapse when it was purchased for $3.25 billion by fellow Swiss investment bank UBS. The bank is also no stranger to Nazi-era scandals, having participated in a historic $1.25 billion settlement with Holocaust victims in 1998.

Some of the bank accounts scrutinized during the investigation were active until at least 2020 — the year the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), a prominent Jewish advocacy organization, announced the discovery of a list of 12,000 Nazis living in Argentina, many of whom had contributed to bank accounts at the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, which later became Credit Suisse. In a March 2020 letter to Credit Suisse Vice President Christian Küng, the SWC stated: “We believe it very probable that these dormant accounts hold monies looted from Jewish victims, under the Nuremberg Aryanization laws of the 1930s. We are aware that you already have claimants as alleged heirs of Nazis in the list.”

The SWC’s claims resulted in Credit Suisse commissioning Neil Barofsky, a New York-based lawyer, to prepare a report based on an investigation. However, Barofsky was removed from his post last November, leaving key questions unanswered, he said. These included “questions about the thoroughness of its prior investigative efforts, the extent to which it served Nazi interests and the banks role in servicing Nazis fleeing justice after the war,” Barofsky was quoted by the New York Times as saying.

The Senate Banking Committee was forced to issue a subpoena to obtain a copy of Barofsky’s report. Its statement noted that in June 2022, “Credit Suisse’s newly-hired General Counsel Markus Diethelm temporarily paused the review after being briefed on the investigation. While AlixPartners [a forensic accounting firm hired by Credit Suisse] was allowed to continue its work in October 2022, Mr. Barofsky received a termination notice in November 2022. Neither Mr. Diethelm’s predecessor nor AlixPartners had expressed any concerns with Mr. Barofsky’s performance. AlixPartners described its relationship with Mr. Barofsky to Committee staff as ‘professional.'”

The committee also criticized Credit Suisse’s research methods, saying that the bank “did not review and investigate all relevant records and did not use a full dataset of the bank’s predecessor entities for portions of its review.”

As one example of the bank’s alleged failure to review all relevant records, the committee quoted a record belonging to a Nazi living in Bolivia that was excluded from the review “because search parameters set by the bank automatically excluded accounts belonging to individuals in certain geographical areas, including Bolivia.”

“Even after the discovery, Credit Suisse did not expand the search parameters,” the committee said.

It also asserted that Barofsky and his investigative team had “identified 366 names of individuals that Mr. Barofsky suggested be included in AlixPartners’s forensic review of Nazi-related accounts held at Credit Suisse. The bank, however, declined to add the names to the review despite, according to AlixPartners in conversations with Committee staff, the technical ease of doing so.”

In response, Credit Suisse referred to its own report, insisting that both the SWC and Barofsky had advanced “numerous factual errors, misleading and gratuitous statements and unsupported allegations that are based on an incomplete understanding of the facts.”

Its report separately concluded: “After a thorough consideration of the findings regarding the Nazi period, which supplement but do not materially alter the information already available in the published historical record, Credit Suisse has concluded that no further measures are currently warranted regarding the issues that the SWC has raised.”

The SWC meanwhile said in a statement that its investigation into Credit Suisse was an outgrowth of its “historic human rights mission to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to future generations.”

The organization said that the decision to remove Barofsky had “eroded SWC’s confidence in a fair, independent, and transparent historical review, especially if the remaining work is completed by any entity with significant ties to Credit Suisse AG.” It expresed gratitude to the Senate Banking Committee for having shone a “light on a dark and troubling past that has remained outside the historical record.”

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