NEW YORK, April 18 (Reuters) – A committee of U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday stated troubled Swiss financial institution Credit score Suisse Group (CSGN.S) hampered a multiyear investigation into the servicing of Nazi shoppers and Nazi-linked accounts.
Credit score Suisse commissioned an investigation into allegations levied by a human rights group that the financial institution held potential Nazi-linked accounts and didn’t disclose them, even throughout Holocaust-related probes many years earlier. A Senate committee’s current investigation into the matter discovered the financial institution hindered the probe and “inexplicably terminated” an impartial reviewer overseeing it.
The “info we have obtained reveals the financial institution established an unnecessarily inflexible and slender scope, and refused to comply with new leads uncovered in the course of the course of the assessment,” Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the rating member of the Senate Funds Committee, stated in an announcement.
Credit score Suisse defended its inside assessment in an announcement, saying that the probe turned up no proof to help key claims from the Simon Wiesenthal Heart that dormant accounts serviced by Credit score Suisse held belongings from Holocaust victims.
A consultant for AlixPartners, the consulting agency Credit score Suisse employed for the probe, didn’t reply instantly to a request for remark.
However the Senate committee stated extra work must be accomplished to trace down the worth of belongings of sure accounts held by Nazis on the financial institution within the post-1945 interval.
The committee stated in an announcement it had opened its personal investigation after receiving “credible allegations of potential wrongdoing” associated to the inner probe, together with the termination of the ombudsman overseeing it.
A spokesperson for the ombudsman, Neil Barofsky, declined to remark. His report, which the committee obtained through a subpoena, discovered many questions had been left “unanswered” after Credit score Suisse determined to halt the assessment.
Reporting by Chris Prentice; modifying by Jonathan Oatis
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