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Credit Suisse announced that a two-year investigation had found no evidence to support claims that many Nazis in Argentina had accounts at the bank’s predecessor during the Nazi era. online news
United States senators, however, contested the way in which the probe had been carried out, saying it had left “blind spots” in forensic research for Nazi-linked records.
In 2020, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), an organisation which researches anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, claimed that many individuals on a list of members of a Nazi-affiliated Argentine labour organisation had accounts at Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (SKA), Credit Suisse’s predecessor bank.
The list of approximately 12,000 members of the Union Alemana de Gremios (UAG) was compiled by an Argentine parliamentary commission in 1941.
The bank commissioned consulting firm AlixPartners to investigate its archives.
AlixPartners found the list referred to 8,951 unique individuals, excluding duplicates.
A 50-strong team spent 50,000 hours going through 480,000 documents, the bank said in a statement late Tuesday.
“Investigators found no evidence to support the SWC’s allegations that many individuals… had accounts at SKA,” Credit Suisse said.
It identified eight individuals on the list who likely had an account relationship with SKA between 1933 and 1945.
“Seven of these relationships were closed by 1937, and only one relationship existed during World War II with a member of the UAG who had emigrated to Argentina in the 1920s,” said Credit Suisse.
But the United States Senate Committee on the Budget said that the bank had limited the scope of the investigation and therefore left blind spots.
The probe “initially overseen by an independent ombudsperson who was inexplicably terminated by the bank during the course of the review”, the committee said.
Senator Chuck Grassley said: “When it comes to investigating Nazi matters, righteous justice demands that we must leave no stone unturned. Credit Suisse has thus far failed to meet that standard.”
He said the bank had set up “an unnecessarily rigid and narrow scope, and refused to follow new leads uncovered during the course of the review”.
In a separate statement, the SWC said the removal of the ombudsperson “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”.
Contacted by AFP on Wednesday, the bank declined to comment on the removal of the ombudsperson.
The bank’s statement said it was aware of “an account” of criticisms alleged against the former ombudsperson, but “strongly rejects these misrepresentations.”
Credit Suisse is being taken over by Switzerland’s biggest bank, UBS.
Contacted by AFP, UBS also declined to comment.
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