nourishing obscurity

The thing is, people rarely do things for other than two reasons – money or personal obsession about some point. This blog was begun because of an obsession with Them.

What was the reason for Herve Falciani [pictured] doing as he did?   If it was for money, who was going to pay it?  The answer might be in here:

The UK’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) office paid around £100,000 for information about its taxpayers with bank accounts in Liechtenstein, according to accountants UHY Hacker Young.

“Paying criminals for data stolen from banks is highly questionable,” said the firm’s tax partner, Roy Maugham. “If people know that there is a market for this data, they will steal it in expectation that HMRC or another tax authority will hand over a six figure sum,” he said.

A Georgina M went with him to Beirut and says it was to sell the data.  Falciani says “in no way“:

Le fisc vous a-t-il rémunéré ? La justice vous a-t-elle offert une protection ? Y a-t-il eu un échange ?  En aucun cas. J’ai dit : voilà la situation, je ne veux pas d’argent. Ils ont su trouver les preuves.

He maintains that in 2006, when he was working on the archiving of data with HSBC, he noted that French customers’ data was being “locked up” in Switzerland.  This article gives a better explanation:

Why did Herve Falciani do this? Difficult to answer. If one reads between the lines of his interview, one understands that its motivations are ideological: as from the moment when he had included/understood what occurred: the practice had to be denounced.

What practice?  The practice of money laundering, of course and tying up data in Switzerland so that French authorities could not access it and bring criminals to trial.  Of course, you’ve already tumbled to the fact that this was HSBC allegedly doing this with “special accounts” in Switzerland and if they are doing it, then which other banks also?

This blog makes no statement either way. How would I know if HSBC has been up to naughties or not?  What the Falciani action does do, of course,  is focus the world’s attention on the question of money laundering, the ability of the “English way” to cloak it all with opacity and the relationship between the need for tax authorities to beef up databases in order to catch out high level crims who go on to escape the net anyway and to use those databases to crack down on the little people in ways unrelated to the catching of high end crims.

Filed under: Politics & economics