30.1.06

the kingdom ain't of this world..

There had been a raid on a building on the rue de la Trémoille in the
aristocratic district of the Champs-Élysées, where officials of a Swiss bank had a five-room apartment. Police had passed through a crowd of impatient clients in the waiting room, entered the office, and seized all available documents.
Albertin argued that the operation should have occurred earlier, as the business had gone on without interruption for ten days. Even so, the police collected 245,000 French francs, 2,000 Swiss francs, and even more important, an index, a cashbook, a file, and ten large notebooks with two thousand names.

[..]

He began to name the names of the tax evader elite, including two bishops, who he said, “though the kingdom isn't of this world,” were able to reconcile their oaths of poverty with the desire to shelter their fortunes.

[...]

Swiss bankers were stunned by the revelations of their clients' names. They feared that unless they could block future exposure, they might lose the deposits people had stashed with them to avoid paying their own countries' taxes. To make sure that account owners' names could never be made public again, in 1934, the Swiss Confederation made it a crime for a bank employee to violate the secrecy of clients' identities. Bank secrecy was born; even law enforcement on the track of thieves could not pierce it.

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