New Delhi: Revelations that global banking giant HSBC helped some of its wealthy clients evade hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax have made headlines across the world, but who is the man who lifted the lid on the scandal?
Hervé Falciani is the man behind revealing formerly secret account information about tax evaders at HSBC's Swiss banking arm.
Hervé Falciani was a systems engineer at the Geneva-based private banking unit of HSBC. Falciani, a dual French-Italian citizen has been described as a “genius with IT algorithms.” However, the bank later found out that he had carried out one of the biggest security breaches in Swiss banking history, obtaining details on the accounts of some 24,000 HSBC private-banking clients.
The data is reported to have been stored on remote servers and that has since been causing havoc for wealthy people the world over who use offshore accounts to hide money from taxation.
The account data later was passed along to tax authorities in European countries—including France, Spain, and the U.K.—who have used it to collect more than $1.34 billion in back taxes.
Falciani, 41, fled Geneva at the end of 2008 and since then has moved to various cities in Europe, one step ahead of Swiss prosecutors who have accused him of data theft, a charge that carries a sentence of up to three years in prison. Spain refused to extradite him after a hearing in April at which a government prosecutor praised him as a whistleblower. He moved this summer to France, where he has testified behind closed doors to parliamentary committees.
He also claimed he made attempts to alert the Swiss authorities, who declined to work with him because he wanted to maintain his anonymity.
(With Agency inputs)
