About this project

About the Swiss Leaks data

The files at the foundation of the Swiss Leaks articles and this interactive application are based on data secreted away by Hervé Falciani, a former HSBC employee-turned-whistleblower. He turned the data over to the French government in 2008 and its tax authority launched an investigation.

The French newspaper Le Monde obtained a version of the tax authority data, which covers accounts of more than 100,000 clients (individuals and legal entities) from more than 200 countries. The newspaper shared it with ICIJ with the agreement that it would assemble a global team of journalists to explore the data and produce this reporting project.

The data comes from three types of internal bank files from different time periods. One reflects clients and their associated private accounts at the Swiss branch of the bank mostly from 1988 to 2007. Another is a snapshot of the maximum amounts in the client accounts during 2006 and 2007. The third is of notes on clients and conversations with them made by bank employees during 2005.

The files show the accounts to hold more than $100 billion in total, from $12.6 billion held in the name of governmental institutions from the oil rich nation of Venezuela under the late former leader Hugh Chávez, to amounts recorded as zero. The confidential files also provide a wealth of other detail, such as secretive offshore companies linked to some accounts.

Credits

Web Application Developer
Matthew Caruana Galizia
Data Analyst
Rigoberto Carvajal
Data Editor
Mar Cabra
Research Editor
Emilia Díaz-Struck
Writers
Marcos García Rey and Delphine Reuter
Researchers
Will Fitzgibbon and Cécile Schilis-Gallego
Contributors
Frédéric Zalac, Gerardo Reyes, Harry Karanikas, Iván Ruiz, Karen Chang, Minna Knus-Galán and Stefan Melichar
Fact-checking
Peter Smith and Crina Boros
Editor
Martha Hamilton
Designer
Álvaro Ortiz
Online Editor
Hamish Boland-Rudder
Assistant Web Application Developer
Cristiam Da Silva
ICIJ Deputy Director
Marina Walker Guevara