Wikileaks: Formal Criminal Investigation Against Swiss Bank Postfinance

by Lucas Dié in Crime, December 19, 2010

The Swiss Federal Attorney General has opened a formal investigation into PostFinance in regard to its handling of the case Julian Assange. This moved followed a formal complaint by Swiss political party Piratenpartei (Pirate Party).

The Swiss Pirate Party has officially intervened with the Federal Attorney General and demanded a criminal investigation into PostFinance on the Federal level. The Attorney General for Bern is already handling such an investigation ex officio, as the Swiss Postal Law states that any breach of Postal Secrecy has to be investigated on suspicion of any breach.

The Federal investigation now gears the investigation up a notch. The Federal Attorney will have to present his findings to the government who will decide on opening legal proceedings or dropping any possible charges. De iure, employees of DiePost (Swiss Mail) are specially protected over legal disputes the same way members of government and MPs are.

Swiss government is of the opinion that PostFinance has not breached any laws. They are contradicted by a host of legal commentaries by notable authorities. The most clear cut opponent of government is Bernard Corboz. Bernard Corboz is noteworthy as a source as he is a former judge of the Federal High Court in Lausanne.

In his commentary, Corboz quite clearly states that postal secrecy is absolute and that even confirming the existence of an account is in breach of the law (this in contradiction to my assessment that confirmation of an account that is already part of the public domain might not be problematical). It would not be the first time that the Swiss government would be proven wrong about one of their legal assessments.

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The government will have to think long and hard over letting any charges drop because the truth might just be too embarrassing. Already, everybody knows that they caved in over US blackmail. Trying to hide that by impeding criminal justice to be dealt would just make things worse. There have been movements in the past to abolish any such special treatment for government and MPs alike. Tampering in the PostFinance affair might just tip the balance where voters will ballot through a law against parliament and government with the aim of abolishing any preferential treatments.

If several criminal investigations aren’t enough, PostFinance is also ridiculed for its handling of the hacker attacks on its website. Leading IT specialists in Switzerland have issued a statement where they severely attack PostFinance for being unprepared for the attack. The attack was amateurish and of low level technicality and any website claiming to be secure should have withstood it without so much as a burp. I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions on the likes of MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal who all crashed, too. It would seem that more money should be spent on banking security than on unearned bonuses.