How is This Not Obstruction of Justice?

Credit Suisse has requested that investors destroy all documentation regarding loans that they invested in involving oligarchs, because it might be used in some sort of prosecution or seizure.

They couch it in terms of, “Embarrassing revelations,” but it’s really about destroying evidence.

They should be frog marched out of their offices in handcuffs:

Credit Suisse has asked hedge funds and other investors to destroy documents relating to its richest clients’ yachts and private jets, in an attempt to stop information leaking about a unit of the bank that has made loans to oligarchs who were later sanctioned.

Investors this week received letters from the Swiss bank requesting that they destroy the documents relating to a securitisation of loans backed by “jets, yachts, real estate and/or financial assets”, according to three people whose firm received the request.

The letters tell the investors to “destroy and permanently erase” any confidential information Credit Suisse previously provided in relation to the transaction, citing a “recent data leak to the media” that it said had been “verified by our investigators”.

Credit Suisse took the action after a Financial Times report last month detailing how it offloaded the risks relating to $2bn of loans to a group of hedge funds.

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One slide revealed that a third of the defaults on its yacht and aircraft loans in 2017 and 2018 were “related to US sanctions against Russian oligarchs”. Press reports at the time indicated that Oleg Deripaska and brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg had to terminate private jet leases with the bank in those years.

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“I don’t think we’ve ever had a request like this,” said one investor who received the letter, noting that his firm had only ever received similar notices when it had been sent confidential documents accidentally.

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The attempt to stop clients leaking confidential information came after Credit Suisse was also hit with an extraordinary leak of documents detailing the accounts of 30,000 of its customers. The so-called “Suisse Secrets” papers pulled back the veil of Swiss banking secrecy, revealing the lender’s ties to oligarchs, corrupt government officials and drug smugglers.

To quote Berkeley Brethed, “Get the cuffs, Ponch.”