Credit Suisse bank today assured that after two years of investigations, no evidence has been found of the existence in Argentina of accounts held by Nazis exiled in the 1930s, as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre accused in 2020.
The investigations, conducted by the forensic investigation firm AlixPartners, in which 50 people examined more than 480,000 documents, “found no evidence to support the Centre’s accusations”, according to a statement from the Zurich bank.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre asked Credit Suisse in March 2020 to investigate 12,000 names on a list that the Centre said included Nazis who had arrived in Argentina in the 1930s, many of whom were suspected of having circulated large amounts of money through Swiss banking accounts.
The list was based on members of the German Union of Guilds, linked to Nazi ideology, many of whom, according to the Centre, had accounts at the Swiss bank Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, a direct predecessor of Credit Suisse.
AlixPartners investigators, according to Credit Suisse, did not find in the list of 12,000 names, reduced to fewer than 9,000 after eliminating duplicates detected, any member of the Argentine Nazi Party, according to the list of members of this organisation drawn up by the US government in 1946.
Credit Suisse noted that the findings are similar to those published two decades ago in the context of the 1999 Global Accord, in which the Simon Wiesenthal Centre also participated, and with which, the Swiss bank pointed out, “an end was put to the controversy over Swiss banks during the Second World War”.
*with Lusa
