The Swiss bank also hired Mr. Wray, then a partner at King & Spalding in Washington, who served as head of the Department of Justice’s crime department and oversaw the Enron task force. (Mr. Wray became director of the FBI three years after negotiating the final plea for Credit Suisse.)
“It is a mystery to me why, under the agreement, the US government did not require the bank to spit out some names of US customers with secret Swiss bank accounts,” said Carl Levin, then a senator in Michigan who was leading an investigation into Offshore Tax Avoidance said after the 2014 opposition agreement.
In the interview, Mr Neiman, the whistleblower’s attorney, said that in July 2014, after the plea deal was signed and Credit Suisse awaited his final conviction, he told officials from the Justice Department’s tax department and federal prosecutors who was on worked on the case that his client had information that the bank was still camouflaging money held by some US account holders. He gave them a name in particular – Dan Horsky, the retired economics professor who lived in Rochester, NY
The tip was checked out. The following year, federal agents arrested Mr. Horsky, who had amassed a fortune of $ 200 million and hidden with the help of Credit Suisse bankers using offshore shell companies, court documents show. The deal lasted several months after the bank signed its pleading agreement.
It is unclear why the Justice Department failed to notify the court and change the terms of its settlement with Credit Suisse based on information from the whistleblower – either prior to Credit Suisse’s final conviction or after Mr Horsky’s case became public. At the time of the conviction, lawyers on both sides told the court that they had no information that could affect the agreement.
Officials with authority to make the decision to review the Credit Suisse case for possible violations in 2014 and 2015 – including James Cole, who was then assistant attorney general, and Dana Boente, the US attorney at Eastern District of Virginia – did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2015, Mr Horsky pleaded guilty to defrauding the US government and said he would work with prosecutors. In 2017 he was sentenced to seven months in prison. Some details of his conviction have been sealed, and a federal judge denied a request from Bloomberg News to lift the seal. The judge said he denied the application after consulting with the Justice Department and Mr Horsky’s lawyers.
Mr Neiman’s client could be amply rewarded if the prosecution imposed further fines on Credit Suisse. According to an IRS rule, whistleblowers can receive up to 30 percent of the amount of additional money the government receives. And, said Mr. Neiman, the whistleblower has more American account holder names than Mr. Horsky’s, although he wouldn’t say how many.
