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Comment by xcambar | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain like I'm 5?

I am uncertain I understand it. Did credit Suisse actually ask to delete financial documentation to hide from the public that they have financially backed oligarchs?

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What I get from the article: Some scumbags loaned money from Credit Suisse. As security, they used their big boats and airplanes.

Credit Suisse then themselves loaned money from hedge funds offering a very good return and using the scumbags loans as security. To prove that they had security for those loans they sent pictures of the boats and planes to the hedgefund.

Then someone told a newspaper that Credit Suisse was loaning money to scumbags.

To make this less embarrasing Credit Suisse is now asking the hedgefund to throw away the picures of the boats.

This is the correct explanation. Their request comes out of trying to limit the damage of this leak:

"Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians"

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/20/credit-suisse-s...

Even the Vatican is on it:

"...One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend €350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal..."

I wonder if this will reawaken Vatican banker death investigations.

I am curious as to why the vatican needed to borrow the 350mil... they could have found that down the back of the sofa easily enough.

Because when you have a lot of money, you can loan money at really low interest rates. Rates that are lower than the rate of return on the investments you'd have to sell to avoid the loan in the first place. If banks are willing to give you really cheap money, you take it.

They also have many many billions sitting in cash accounts with CS earning 0 (and in some account negative rates).

But yes, deals are much easier to structure as 100% debt and the investment, maintains liquidity and limits liability. Set up investment co, borrow with gaurantee from parent etc.

Just wow... A picture??? Wouldn't a serious banking concern ask for titles and formal legal documentation?

And damn, Credit Suisse really is a cesspool. Not that other big banks are any different, say Deutsche, but Credit Suisse seems to be both, stupid enough to be caught and scum bag enough to actually do it.

the "beauty" about Swiss banking is that it's like banking in the rest of (Western) EU in the 70ies. A lot less paper but a lot more personal intuition (personality cults) that make the power decisions. While this is true in all of banking in onshore jurisdictions of Barclays or Deutsche they still need to have some form of paperwork and that backs up decisions and show compliance. Switzerland is still the wild-west. That said Swiss banking is a lot more organized, transparent (to foreign institutions) than other offshore jurisdictions like Nevada, New Mexico, UAE (and the more well known exotic places like Panama).

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands

Less potentially confusing if you use the terms "to borrow money from" and "to loan money to".

Yeah! I’ so confused reading some of these comments.

Isn’t “loan” to lend money, and “borrow” to receive money?

Do some locales use “loan” as both?

some (most?) languages have a single bidirectional word

In Swedish for example, “att låna” is ”to borrow”, and ”att låna ut” is ”to lend” (”to loan out”).

German leihen is loan, while verleihen is lend. The "ver" is akin to "away", i.e., "loan away" (though this isn't a 1:1 translation and only works for one of the meanings on both sides of the language barrier).

In Haitian creole, if the main object of the verbe “prete” is a person, it means loan, and the second object says what. If it’s only one non person object, it means borrow.

No, you’re right. Probably English is not their first language.

Sorry, yes. I wrote that mess. I'm swedish, we use the same word for both sides of the transaction. "Låna" - very obviously related to the english "loan". It didn't occur to me that there is a directionality to the English term.

s/loaned money from/borrowed money from/

That's what the headline seems to imply. The article isn't that clear. My guess is that what they are doing isn't illegal. Basically Credit Suisse has papers that its customers supplied in confidence to secure loans, and those documents are probably no longer strictly needed, and so it is getting rid of them in case there is another leak of their internal files, like there was recently.

It is'nt clear. For instance, to me it's not clear if that can be obstruction of justice in a forth-coming investigation.

You should keep in mind it is in the context of a securitisation, i.e. selling public securities. It's unikely that highly confidential information was shared with the investors not the least because it's may not be relevant to their investment. My guess, not knowing anything about the transaction, but from what the articles says, is that they may have shared some financials from the persons the planes were leased to, under NDA. And given data leaks, they probably went to all the investors they shared confidential information with in the past and ask them to delete it unless they still need it.

So? Aren't we talking about hiding evidence that something may have connection to sanctioned individuals?

If so, I agree with everything you said but it could still be obstruction of justice.

Maybe.

It's Swiss law that records must be kept at least for 10 years. Two months ago I threw away the bookkeeping and the tax declaration of my sole proprietorship of the year 2011.

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