On December 22nd, 2008, Swiss federal police
handcuffed 36-year-old Hervé Falciani, a systems specialist they
suspected of stealing data from HSBC Private Bank Geneva,
his employer, and trying to sell it to banks in Lebanon. They seized
his computer, searched his Geneva home and interrogated him for hours.
Then – on the condition that he return the next day for more questioning – they let him go.
And go he did. Renting a car, Falciani picked up his wife and daughter
and drove straight to France. There he began downloading vast amounts of
HSBC data that he had stored on remote servers and that has since been
causing havoc for wealthy people the world over who use offshore
accounts to hide money from taxation: client names and account holdings
as well as notes about the bank’s conversations with them.
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