A leak revealing secret Swiss banking records implicates several figures from the South Caucasus, including former president of Armenia Armen Sarkissian and the sons of the head of Nakhichevan Vasif Talibov.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) published its findings from a leak identifying 18,000 foreign customers at Credit Suisse whose holdings amount to a total of over $8 billion. The accounts belong to “corrupt politicians, criminals, spies, dictators and other dubious characters,” according to the OCCRP report.
“Credit Suisse’s clients included the family of an Egyptian intelligence chief who oversaw torture of terrorism suspects for the CIA; an Italian accused of laundering criminal funds for the infamous ‘Ndrangheta criminal group; a German executive who bribed Nigerian officials for telecoms contracts; and Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who held a single account worth 230 million Swiss francs ($223 million) at its peak, even as his country raked in billions in foreign aid,” the February 20 report reads.
Data from the leak was provided to 48 media outlets worldwide, including Armenian investigative news outlet Hetq. Hetq uncovered that approximately 400 Armenian citizens hold bank accounts at Credit Suisse, including Sarkissian and his sister Karine Sargsyan.
Former President Armen Sarkissian
Sarkissian and Sargsyan held more than 10 million Swiss francs in a Credit Suisse bank account between 2006 and 2016 that he did not disclose in his financial declarations. Sarkissian was legally obligated to submit a financial statement upon his appointment as Armenian ambassador to the United Kingdom in 2013, a post he held until his election to the presidency in 2018.
In 2013, Sarkissian declared that he held eight million euros. In 2016, Hetq reported that Sarkissian had not submitted his financial holdings for several years. Sarkissian submitted his annual disclosures from the previous five years in 2017, following notices from Armenia’s Ethics Committee. Those statements did not include the 10 million francs in his Credit Suisse account, according to Armenia’s Corruption Prevention Commission.
Reached for a comment from Hetq, Sarkissian said that “accessing details of someone’s private bank account, as you have, is wrong and unlawful, all over the world. It is an infringement of privacy and breach of confidentiality.”
According to Sarkissian, positions served on a pro bono basis, like diplomatic posts, only require the declaration of cash holdings.
“It was not certain that the rules obliging officials to declare their interests applied in such circumstances and, in fact, others serving on a pro bono basis did not make any declarations,” he said.
His financial declarations did not specify whether his assets were cash or electronic.
“They were not electronic at the time and did not oblige me to declare specific bank accounts, only my cash holdings, which I declared every year,” he told Hetq.
Sarkissian had three other Credit Suisse accounts that closed before he took office.
Sarkissian resigned at the end of January, citing the constitutional limits on the power of the presidency to influence policy in times of national crisis. Yet an investigation published by Hetq said that Sarkissian resigned after he was contacted by journalists regarding his secret second citizenship of St. Kitts and Nevis.
According to Hetq, Sarkissian held a passport for the Caribbean nation as late as 2017. Under the Armenian Constitution, the president must have held citizenship of only the Republic of Armenia for the preceding six years.
The office of the president denied the media report, calling it an “attempt to divert public attention by a false agenda.”
Vasif Talibov, Heydar Aliyev and Ilham Aliyev (Twitter)
The Credit Suisse leak also names Seymur and Rza, sons of the leader of the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic Vasif Talibov.
Three separate banking leaks reveal that Rza and Seymur received wire transfers worth a total of $20.5 million between 2007 and 2012 in bank accounts held with Credit Suisse, Emirates NBD, Barclays and other major financial institutions.
The money came from two shell companies, Murova Systems and Continus Corporation, which are associated with the Azerbaijani and Troika Laundromats. The Azerbaijani Laundromat is a multi-billion dollar secret slush fund used among other things to purchase silence from European politicians regarding Azerbaijani human rights abuses.
In 2012, Rza purchased two buildings in the Georgian resort town of Batumi that he converted into a five-star hotel. Rza, Seymur and their sister Baharkhanim also bought a dozen properties in Dubai, including a luxurious villa and a 12-floor apartment hotel. In total, their properties are worth an estimated $63 million.
Talibov’s official salary is about $26,000 per year. The report says that the Talibov family “enriched itself from questionable sources even as Nakhchivan’s people suffered.”
Rza and Seymur Talibov (Facebook)
“Talibov has led Nakhchivan with an iron fist for more than 26 years. Under his rule, detainees have been subject to beatings and vicious torture. Dissidents have been forced into psychiatric hospitals. He has also used his power to silence independent media: Journalists and activists who criticized his rule have faced pressure, arrest, and exile,” the OCCRP report reads.
Credit Suisse has faced a string of scandals over the past two decades regarding its facilitation of money laundering and tax evasion. The bank currently faces charges of allowing a group of Bulgarian cocaine smugglers to launder 146 million euros through its accounts.
The OCCRP interviewed over a dozen anonymous Credit Suisse employees. Most spoke of a “highly toxic corporate culture that incentivized taking on risk to maximize profits—and bonuses.”
“The bank incentivizes a banker to look the other way with an account they know to be toxic,” said a former senior manager. “If you close a toxic account, especially a large account in excess of $20 million, the banker finds himself in a deep hole. A deep hole that is almost impossible to get out of.”
Credit Suisse released a statement in response to the report stating that it “strongly rejects the allegations and inferences about the bank’s purported business practices.” According to Credit Suisse, the media reports are based on “partial, selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank’s business conduct.”
Critics also blame the Swiss government for creating a “lax regulatory environment and laws that punish those who speak out against corruption.”
“The irony is that Switzerland has become the place for dirty money to go because it is pure, well-managed, reliable,” says James Henry, a senior adviser to the U.K. charity Tax Justice Network who has studied tax evasion at Credit Suisse. “The business model of taking money out of poor countries is the problem.”