NOT IN SWITZERLAND

Apr 13, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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It is not even remotely possible for those who are stealing from the public purse, or those who are supporting their friends and cronies in creaming off resources from the State, to deposit their ill-gotten gains in Switzerland.
Not Switzerland. That country had in the past acquired a reputation as a safe haven for funds plundered by dictators who had emptied their national treasuries.
Even our own Forbes Burnham was said to have hidden his wealth in Swiss bank accounts. The evidence of this has however never been produced and so it remains unknown whether Burnham died as poor as his estate indicated.
What is known is that during the period when he allowed an American commune at Jonestown, that a great deal of money moved between that commune and Switzerland. When the bank accounts of the People’s Temple, the religious sect that operated the commune, were made public, it was discovered that some eight million United States dollars, was held in Swiss bank accounts.  Now what was the People’s Temple doing with that sort of dough? Where was it coming from?
After the mass murder suicide on November 18, 1978 in Guyana, some US$600,000 in cash was removed from Jonestown and lodged with the government. Whose money was this? This money could not have been raised by a struggling agricultural commune whose members were facing such hardships that large numbers wanted to go back to America.
It was also rumoured – a rumour that has been resurrected in present studies into Jonestown – that a person close to Forbes Burnham along with a high ranking government official, had left Jonestown with huge sums of money along with other valuables, including diamonds.
A foreign newspaper ran an article questioning what the then government of Guyana did with the more than one million US dollars that was removed from the site along with what was held by the commune in local bank accounts.
The Guyana Government reacted angrily and produced bank records which showed that the monies had been deposited in the Bank of Guyana. However, to this day, we have not been told what happened to those sums and whether it is still being held in the local central bank.
What we do know is that the eight million United States dollars was confirmed as being held in Switzerland and this precipitated a series of lawsuits against the Peoples Temple. The Swiss apparently cooperated with the investigation into the funds of the Peoples Temple, but by this time that country had already acquired a reputation as a safe haven for questionable funds.
Removing this stigma was never going to be easy since the secrecy laws of Switzerland prevented disclosure.
Things have however improved and there is now far greater openness and transparency. The Swiss Government is also serious about preventing its financial system from being used as a conduit or storage for criminal funds.
In 1986, after Baby Doc Duvalier fled Haiti, the new government requested from the Swiss authorities that  funds deposited by the Duvalier family be returned to that country, but the Swiss authorities were at the time hamstrung by the existing secrecy laws.
Last year, the Swiss Government took a decision that since in its estimation the Duvalier family did not prove to them that the funds were licit, that it would give the money, which was some 4.6 million US dollars, to organizations working in Haiti.
The Duvalier family challenged the decision and won on the basis that the statute of limitations had expired. This decision incidentally was made public just hours before this year’s devastating earthquake struck Haiti. Since then the government has issued a decree freezing the funds and thus preventing the Duvalier family from having access to it, but the family has challenged that decree.
The positions adopted by the Swiss authorities and its recent cooperation in tax evasion charges against major US companies suggest that Switzerland is serious about removing any implications about it being a haven for illicit funds.
The global financial crisis will further place pressure on the Swiss authorities to improve transparency and be more open to disclosure about the sources of suspected criminal proceeds which may have found its way into that country’s financial system.
It would therefore be very foolish for anyone in Guyana who is stealing from the public treasury or who is making money because of political connections to deposit those monies in Switzerland.
No, that is not going to happen since it will be traced.  Why deposit in Swiss banks when the money can be hid elsewhere where the laws are slacker? Placing illegal funds in Swiss banks is too risky. The more likely possibility is that these proceeds are going to be deposited and invested right here in Guyana through a number of companies operating as fronts for the carpetbaggers.

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