WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has pledged that his latest leaked documents will reveal corruption and crime in the shadowy world of offshore banking, but observers eager for scintillating revelations about Canadian account holders may be in for a disappointment.
The latest WikiLeaks source to come forward, Rudolf Elmer, a former banker with Swiss financial institution Julius Baer, has previously disseminated confidential banking records from the bank’s offices in the Cayman Islands to media outlets, including The Globe and Mail.
Buried in Mr. Elmer’s first batch of leaked material – a labyrinth of file folders, spreadsheets and Microsoft Word files – were accounts linked to two Canadians: one, a Toronto businessman, and the second, former Hollinger executive David Radler.
At a packed press conference in London on Monday, Mr. Elmer and Mr. Assange were short on specifics about how much new information is in the latest data dump. In 2008, before WikiLeaks was a household name and driving the international news agenda, Mr. Elmer posted details on thousands of accounts that he had downloaded from Julius Baer’s Cayman Islands servers. Mr. Elmer was fired from the bank in 2002 after a long-standing dispute. The former banker has said he is trying to expose how offshore financial institutions use banking secrecy laws to facilitate wide-scale tax evasion, while his former employer has accused him of being “frustrated about unfulfilled career aspirations” and launching a campaign of intimidation.
On Monday, Mr. Radler said he was frequently in the Cayman Islands because of Hollinger’s stake in the island’s premier newspaper company, Cayman Free Press Ltd., and that the accounts were created to hold his directors’ fees. The documents in Mr. Elmer’s 2008 trove contain nothing that indicates wrongdoing by Mr. Radler. It isn’t illegal for a Canadian to have an offshore account, as long as the account holder declares the funds to tax collectors. The documents show that, as of 1999, the former newspaper executive held at least $200,000 in his Julius Baer accounts.
Mr. Radler said all of his Cayman-based funds – which were held in the names of entities such as Sunshine Investments and Rainy Day Trust – were declared to the Canada Revenue Agency.
“When I used to go down, I used to put money there and I used to take out money. And at one time I was considering buying a condo there. But it was always reported. There was never any nonsense,” said Mr. Radler, who famously broke ranks with his former business partner, Conrad Black, agreeing to co-operate with the authorities, plead guilty to one count of fraud and testify against Lord Black.
The Globe was unable to reach the other Canadian, a Toronto businessman, identified in Mr. Elmer’s cache.
If and when WikiLeaks releases the whistleblower’s latest banking details, Mr. Elmer may not be in a position to celebrate the disclosure. The former banker goes on trial later this week in his native Switzerland for allegedly violating that country’s rigid and sacrosanct banking secrecy laws.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/wikileaks-promises-new-batch-of-banking-documents/article1873901/
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