Former Cayman banker cleared by top Swiss court
Rudolf Elmer
(CNS): Rudolf Elmer (62), who leaked documents to WikiLeaks after he was fired from the Cayman branch of a Swiss bank, has been cleared of breaking Switzerland’s bank secrecy laws by the country’s supreme court. Swiss prosecutors had appealed the acquittal of the former employee of the Zürich-based bank, Julius Baer, but the justices on the top Swiss court ruled that the Cayman arm where Elmer worked should not be considered a Swiss bank. “Mr Elmer was neither an employee nor representative of a Swiss bank,” according to Article 47, Christian Denys, president of the Swiss criminal court said in the ruling.
The whistleblower engaged in a ten-year battle with Swiss authorities over the data he leaked to the online portal in 2008. He had moved to Cayman in 1994 as an accountant for Julius Baer Bank & Trust Company Ltd, and by 1999 was chief operating officer. But he was fired in 2002 after being involved in the leaks, or “bank data theft” as it was described by the Swiss authorities.
In early 2005 he leaked information about the bank’s clients to Swiss tax authorities and was later accused of sending a CD filled with client account data to the editors of Der Spiegel. But in 2008 the Zürich business magazine reported that Elmer was the source of documents leaked by WikiLeaks.
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Then in 2011 he publicly handed over more CDs of bank data to Julian Assange, the controversial founder of WikiLeaks, at a London press conference. He was then arrested and held by the Swiss authorities in solitary confinement for several months.
Eventually, his case was tried and he was convicted in early 2015 of violating Swiss banking secrecy. The following year the Swiss appeals court overturned the secrecy violation charge but gave him a 14-month suspended sentence for sending threatening letters to former colleagues.
Category: Local News
If he was a real caymanian then he would be locked up – simple. We arent as priviledged as the UK XXXXX and US folks are globally.
So as you may recall the story of this “whistleblower” was effectively that of a disgruntled mediocre employee who stole confidential data and initially tried to sell it back to his ex employer, then some European tax authorities and when all else failed developed a social conscience about tax avoidance and gave the info to Wikileaks…who really didn’t find a lot of value in it. I met him a few times…he was arrogant and really dimwitted….I really hope one day he will end up in Northward.
Dear CNS you have omitted the fact that this little piece of &#!% got nearly 10 million from various governments for being a rat! my only hope is that he had to spend all of it on lawyers defending him.
except he’s winning
Another one here for us ??and if mr Elmer Fudd had got his little promotion at the bank so he could plump his stinking European @$$ down here like the rest, he would happily gone along wid the colonial program.But alas it was not to be but I do like the Swiss ruling though which clearly sets down exactly what those broke Ass Europeans think of us cockroaches in the colonies. We are not Swiss or European either no matter how many little red books they lend us to travel with and our rights will always be written in pencil in which they will always control and exercise the eraser. Yes Cayman this what happens when you sellout your rights you are left with mere privileges which are easily taken away by those who have them. All Hail the FCO! May she last for 1000 years.
It sounds to me they really making excuses to take market share back home? I hope we have a plan “B”.
If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear from disclosure. The Swiss bank secrecy laws have in past protected dictators, drug dealers, gangsters, terrorists and (if you go back to the 1940s) Nazis. They’ve also (allegedly) been used to channel funding for organisations like the CIA, KGB, MI6 and Mossad.
Good news.
Keeping secrets was highly prized in the business world prior to 9/11. The Patriot and HIRE Acts that came afterwards, as well as numerous other allied initiatives, MOUs, TIEAs and Treaties have paved the way for a new era of global transparency (or at least the appearance of), and we aren’t going back. We’ve had 17 years to come to grips with the predictable and disproportionate zeitgeist of this ongoing disclosure. Despite our rapid shift in stance post-9/11 and early adoption of what are now becoming globally-adopted standards, successive Cayman Islands regimes neglected to correct the popular narrative of what goes on here. Listening to Eric Bush dither on the questioning from Bryant on UBO disclosure, we ought to have had an immediate prepared response to point out that, unlike mother, we have a true UBO Registry, which UK Law enforcement can access. A commitment to a secondary public UBO registry of nominee signatories would put us in compliance to the same degree as the UK homeland, if we decided to agree to do that by Dec 2020, and I think we should. We should also correct the narrative!