Hervé Falciani, who blew the whistle on HSBC in 2008, was arrested in Madrid. Spanish authorities acted at the behest of Switzerland, which wants the whistleblower extradited to serve time for violating banking secrecy laws.
Spanish police arrested French-Italian data thief and whistleblower Hervé Falciani, according to various media reports. The former information technology staffer at HSBC in Geneva, who is behind one of the biggest leaks in Swiss banking history, was convicted in absentia by a Swiss court in 2015 and sentenced to five years in jail.
Switzerland has issued an extradition request for Falciani, who has avoided Switzerland since fleeing with confidential data on roughly 15,000 clients in France, Britain, and Germany. Falciani, a cause célèbre since taking the data, was apparently nabbed on a Madrid street on his way to a conference.
As a result of the leak, France, Austria, Belgium, and Argentina began investigating thousands of tax dodgers and cheats. In Switzerland, HSBC paid more than 40 million Swiss francs ($41.7 million) to settle the probe.
Fair Trial?
HSBC's Swiss-based private bank, led by former UBS banker Franco Morra, reported a hefty pretax loss last year following a fine in France as well as provisions to settle probes still pending.
The bank has shrunk dramatically in Switzerland in recent years, after withdrawing from some markets and offloading undesirable clientele. Falciani's 2015 conviction in Switzerland was for corporate espionage – the court did not convict him of violating banking secrecy, nor could prosecutors make a charge of illegally collecting data, stick. He had hoped to sell the data to foreign officials.
Falciani had already been arrested in Barcelona in 2012 on an international arrest warrant, but a Spanish judge denied Switzerland's extradition request. Falciani himself has in the past claimed he is willing to stand trial, but that he doesn't believe he will get an impartial hearing in Switzerland.
