Swiss: 1,500 money-laundering cases last year

Swiss authorities disrupted more than 1,500 suspected money-laundering cases last year, including 15 linked to terrorist financing, officials said today.
In all, there were 1,585 "suspicious activity reports" for 2012 involving 3.15 billion Swiss francs (USD 3.3 billion) just six of the reports accounted for almost half of all the money.
The past two years have seen an almost 50 per cent jump in the number of cases compared with previous years.
Two-thirds of the cases were linked to banking, and more than 200 cases involved more than 100,000 Swiss francs (USD 104,000). The rest were mainly tied to payment services, fiduciary and asset managers.

Switzerland has in recent years tried to shed its image as a haven for money laundering and tax evasion through the misuse of its vaunted banking secrecy.
Authorities have set up police units and task forces to crack down on fraud, bribery and other financial crimes and to hunt for so-called dictator assets.

The government also has signed deals with other nations to provide greater assistance to foreign tax authorities seeking information on their citizens' accounts.
One of the terrorist-financing cases in 2012 involved 7.45 million francs (USD 7.8 million) and accounted for nearly all of the money that police investigated in connected with suspected terrorists, the Swiss federal police office reported.

None of the suspects was on any official terror list, said the annual report by the police's Money Laundering Reporting Office.
Probes by the police office led prosecutors to open 13 terror financing cases connected to money laundering, membership in a criminal organization or other offenses, the report said. One of the cases has since been suspended.
Of the 15 terror cases, the money sent by banks, asset managers and a money transmitter went to eight Russians, six Lithuanians and one American.
Half the clients sending the money were from Switzerland; the others were from Cyprus, Sri Lanka and the United States.

Though the overall number of money-laundering cases was high in 2012, the police said, they were not characterized by any exceptional political circumstances like the political upheaval in 2011 that swept across North Africa and the Middle East.
Three involved the suspected misappropriation of foreign public funds, police said, while two were connected to suspected document forgery and fraud and one concerned an alleged crime group from Asia.
Most of the cases were initially reported by a financial intermediary banks, credit card companies, casinos, currency exchanges and others or were based on newspaper reports or information from other third parties such as financial compliance databases.