‘Banks are accomplices of tax evasion crimes’
The “Evasion in the financial system” film is a documentary directed by former minister of Culture Jorge Coscia. It is based on the information leaked in the media by Hervé Falciani, an ex-employee of HSBC’s Swiss private bank, on clients and their tax situation.
The C5N news channel aired this week the four episodes that complete the film, showing exclusive testimonies by Falciani who reveals further details on the financial maneuvers that allow tax evasion and capital flight crimes.
In 2009, Falciani told the AFIP tax bureau that HSBC had helped around 4,000 clients evade taxes by stashing their money in secret Swiss bank accounts.
“The country that sold the best system of money control in the world was doing it without any efficient control and those consequences we see them in the laundering of money,” Falciani says in the documentary aiming at Switzerland’s banking system.
“Where they should know where the money came from, they did not know if it came from a crime,” he affirms.
The former HSBC employee – who in 2008 fled Geneva with files that were leaked to the media and are alleged to show evidence of tax evasion by clients -, said “secret allows impunity” when talking about how the accounts were concealed, considering bank managers “accomplices” of tax evasion crimes.
According to Falciani, they are the ones allowing the concealment of the accounts. “There are people that have no job but own accounts with millions of dollars,” he said adding that Interpol “has made of me a persecuted person in 190 countries in the world.”
The movie shows as well the media coverage on the HSBC scandal in Europe and Argentina and the different ways in which the story was told, either emphasizing or downplaying the facts.
“What would happen if the banking system turned into the shelter of thousands of thieves?” director Coscia asks in the film, interviewing economists Alfredo Zaiat and Raúl Delatorre, Francois Gezet, Gabriel Zucman – a professor in the University of Berkeley -, and Denis Robert, the reporter who broke the Clearstream political scandal in France, among others.
