(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
'Am I a thief? Yes, I broke the law – but it was a law that hurt everyone. (…) If you work for the system, you understand the system. And that is what became unbearable. " (Hervé Falciani)
Falciani's Tax Bomb: The Man Behind the Swiss Leaks
Directed by Ben Lewis
Germany / Spain, 2015
Ten years ago, Julian Assange founded the website WikiLeaks, an open digital library of sensitive information related to military operations and other controversial disclosures. The term warning is not new, but over the last ten years, the extensive media attention that has been taken into account by the phenomenon has contributed to greater impact on the notifier's agenda. Alarms such as Assange, Chelsey Manning and Edward Snowden achieve status as heroes and celebrities at the cost of long exile stays and loss of past life.
The role of the notifier represents a fresh alternative to more traditional hero characters, and is increasingly portrayed in fiction and documentary films. Examples include Bill Condon's thriller The Fifth Estate (2013) on Julian Assange, Laura Poitras' documentary Citizenfour (2014) about Edward Snowden, and Oliver Stone's current fiction film Snowden (2016)
Catchy and impersonal. The story of IT engineer Hervé Falciani illustrates how an invisible official helps to pulverize an institution that has been central to the world's financial elite with roots back to the French Revolution: The banking secret, or bank discretion.
Director Ben Lewis is best known for the documentaries Hammer & Tickle (2006) Google and the World Brain (2013) and Poor Us: An American History of Poverty (2012). Here i Falciani's Tax Bomb Lewis captures Falciani's whistleblowing adventure in a rigorous, catchy and precise documentary with knowledgeable interview subjects as well as graphic and musical elements that awaken associations with financial thrillers à la James Bond or Jason Bourne. But no deeply personal portrait of the protagonist is the film, and the director makes no other than superficial attempts to understand Falciani's motivation and relationship with employer HSBC.
Money laundering. According to assistant professor Gabriel Zucman at the London School of Economics, Switzerland is the world's leading center for cross – border wealth management: Eight percent of the world's wealth is in tax havens, and about a third of this is managed by Swiss banks. Former Swiss Minister of Finance Hans-Rudolf Merz explains that banking discretion has been Switzerland's foremost competitive advantage as a world economic center. Merz defends bank discretion by protecting the private sphere, an important principle from the Enlightenment.
Hervé Falciani grew up in Monaco and worked as an accountant at a casino while he trained as an IT engineer. In 2001 he was hired by the world's second largest bank, HSBC Private Bank in Zurich. Through the work on databases, he realized that the strict secrecy of Swiss banks facilitated international tax evasion and money laundering.
When Falciani downloaded a complete register of HSBC's clients and transactions in 2008, he was left with a dataset of over 100 GB with information on staggering international fortunes belonging to 15 economic elites from around the world, including diamond dealers, politicians, nobility and royalty, entertainment personalities, sports celebrities, lawyers, business magnates and bankers. All funds kept in secret accounts evaded the tax authorities of their home countries.
New transparency. Falciani is an attractive, elegant man who comfortably unfolds in front of the camera and who calls himself an idealist. But the first thing he did after stealing a copy of the employer's client database was to start an anonymous company with his HSBC colleague and mistress Georgina Mikhael. Together, they tried to sell client data to Audi Bank in Lebanon for the $ 1000 client. The pair did not get a bite, but the inquiry caused Lebanon to alarm HSBC, and soon after Switzerland issued an international arrest warrant on Falciani.
After failing to contact the German intelligence service, Falciani handed over the dataset to France's then Finance Minister Christine Lagarde. At that time, Falciani was living in exile in France with his family.
Although France shared Falciani's client list with many European countries and Falciani went out in the media, it took several years before anything substantial happened. England, Germany, Greece and France managed to recover only a fraction of the evaded tax, while Spain had a slightly better result with 90 charges and recovery of € 264 million in taxes and penalties. One of the problems was that stolen data could not be used as evidence in court, but worse was the indecision and internal strife that saved the authorities in how they handled the information.
Falciani is an attractive, elegant man who comfortably unfolds in front of the camera and who calls himself an idealist.
Only when the United States became involved did Falciani's data theft have dramatic consequences. US tax authorities, which suffered tax evasion of about $ 100 billion a year, trumped up a law in 2010 (FATCA, Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) which obligated all the world's banks to provide information on US clients' account numbers and deposits with US tax authorities. At that moment, bank discretion collapsed, and Swiss major banks such as HSBC, UBS and Credit Suisse had to pay record fees to the United States. A similar global standard for transparency and exchange of bank account information was established by the OECD in 2014 under the name Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters. So far, 51 countries have ratified the standard.
Money is like water. When Falciani traveled by boat from France to Spain in 2012, the international arrest warrant was triggered and he was jailed for five months. He then spent several years in Spain under armed protection while working with the Spanish authorities on tax investigations, trying (unsuccessfully) to be elected to the European Parliament as the representative of the anti-tax fraud party Match X. In 2015, he was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison in Switzerland for gross financial espionage, data theft and breach of bank discretion. He currently resides in Paris.
Falciani's history is about two central but clashing values in the enlightenment community: the right to a private life, and the duty to contribute to the maintenance of a democratic society. Peer Steinbrück, former prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, points out that HSBC's clients are on the "top floor of society", but that they are cutting the branch they are sitting on when they fail to pay taxes because they destabilize the system they depend on. Former Swiss Finance Minister Merz concludes that "money is like water, it flows into all cracks". As long as it remains lucrative and feasible, tax fraud will continue. Authorities and law-abiding proletarians will continue to rely on visibility knights like Falciani to be informed of the theft of the elites.
