His wife, Simona, would be worried about him. But they suspected that Chidiak was a pseudonym, and that the real culprit was Falciani.įalciani told the police that his job was to protect data: How could they accuse him of compromising such information? As darkness fell, he asked to go home.
They weren’t sure how much information had been taken or how the theft had been engineered. Police officials told Falciani that someone calling himself Ruben al-Chidiak had stolen client data from the bank. In light of these safeguards, the notion of a breach at H.S.B.C. Switzerland is the home of the numbered account: customers often specify that they prefer not to receive statements, in order to avoid a paper trail. For Swiss wealth managers, who oversaw more than two trillion dollars in international deposits, the promise to maintain financial privacy was akin to a religious vow of silence. International élites could place their fortunes beyond the reach of tax authorities in their own countries. Since 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva banned banks from revealing the private information of their customers, Switzerland had thrived on its reputation as a stronghold of financial secrecy. They were investigating a data theft from the bank. Officers questioned Falciani at a nearby station. As the Swiss police escorted him from the building, he insisted that he had done nothing wrong. He had grown up in Monaco, where as a young man he had worked as a croupier at the Casino de Monte-Carlo, and developed an excellent poker face. He was a computer technician who helped supervise security systems for the handling of client data. for eight years, initially in Monaco and then in Geneva. He was on the staff of the company’s private Swiss bank, which serves clients who are wealthy enough to afford the minimum deposit-half a million dollars-required to open an account. Falciani, who was thirty-six, worked for H.S.B.C., then the largest bank in the world. Photograph by Moises Saman / Magnum for The New YorkerĪ few days before Christmas in 2008, Hervé Falciani was in a meeting at his office, in Geneva, when a team of police officers arrived to arrest him. Hervé Falciani, who took client data from H.S.B.C., was indicted in Switzerland, jailed in Spain, and celebrated in France.
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