We do not negotiate with a banker, any more than we would negotiate with a terrorist.

Hervé Falciani, HBSC whistleblower (Swiss Leaks)

The Power of the Banks is harmful to us all

It is now proven that the excesses of the banking industry have caused precariousness, debt and mass-unemployment. For everyone to understand the stakes of finance, all the schools in the world should play to their pupils the ‘TEDx talk’ by Jérôme Cazes entitled “A Financial Transition for the Planet” that was recorded in Clermont-Ferrand on October 22^nd, 2016. This ten-minute public talk by the former managing director of the COFACE (company specialized in credit insurance, part of the Natixis group) explains with a learner-centered approach that “banks are the most powerful private organizations in the world” and that “large banks have turned into a public threat because they are poisoned by market finance” (…) and that it is “our responsibility to bring them back to serve the general interest”.

The sociologist Jean Ziegler also tackles the financial system when he observes that “the financial sector shares a great part of the responsibility because the largest banks haven’t stopped playing on the food trade market. At the same time, one billion people are seriously underfed. Each second, a child dies of hunger”.

Unfortunately, Mr. Ziegler’s alerts are perhaps akin to crying in the wilderness because we learnt at the end of year 2020 that water, just like wheat and oil, was traded on the US stock exchange. As highlighted by Augustin Langlade in his article published in the French independent media La Releve et la Peste: “If the XXth century was the one of black gold, the XXIst century could then become the one of the blue gold. The rarer the water, the more profitable it will be. Financiers understand it, this is why they are trying to achieve new markets while pushing States to privatize the national distribution systems”. This article reminds us that the Mexican civilians have been suffering from the lack of water, important grants being managed by multinational companies, Coca-Cola being one of them. The development and stock market price of multinationals seem to be more important to the financiers rather than caring about the fact that water is an 'unalienable collective resource'.

The banking scandals have all demonstrated that offshore finance, thanks to its opacity and its lack of control, has the perversity to mix in some of the clean money with the dirty one. Which very clearly means that being a whistleblower alerting about the wrongdoings of the finance industry, is attacking the heart of the excesses of the economical activity and of the ones who would be our ‘elites’; a battle we have been fighting for more than ten years and which de facto explains why we have never been protected nor supported by the men elected to lead our so-called democratic countries, and namely the ‘country of the human rights’.

During a conference given in Paris on September 21^st, 2015 with her husband Michel Pinçon, Monique Pinçon-Charlot declared that the violence in the vocabulary used towards the people is the feature of what she calls the “feodal system”. She analyses that “amongst the wealthiest of us, there is a new type of society that is formed into business, industry and the top public sector (those named as ‘The Top 5000’). Plutocracy - From the Greek words ploutos and kratos: Government by the richest people of a country. Nowadays, the lobbies represented by the multinational companies enjoy a very close relation with our elected representatives and de facto influence the texts of the laws - is obsessed by enrichment. The double-blade of its weapon of war is on one side to subjugate citizens to public deficit and debt – otherwise everyone would have a job and would eat one’s fill – and on the other side, tax optimization which has become anatural fraud being transmitted from one generation to another because it is a class fraud”. Banking scandals have all proven that offshore banking, thanks to its opacity and its lack of control, has the perversity to mix clean and dirty money. The statements made by Monique Pinçon-Charlot very clearly mean that being a whistleblower exposing information about offshore finance is fighting the core of the wrongdoings of the economic activity and the so-called ‘elites’.

The foundation of our societies is clearly questioned as we face a banking industry which is qualified by some as criminal: corruption, fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, double accounting; all of which have caused precariousness, unemployment and misery in Europe and everywhere in the world. Some grow richer year after year unscrupulously whilst others die slowly by inches for years – exactly like the frog slowly and gently cooked. Without banks, financial transactions wouldn’t exist. The worst part is that nobody controls the banks. The scandals of Julius Baer, SwissLeaks, LuxLeaks and UBS but also the Panama and Paradise Papers as well as the Malta files have proven that these malfunctions were possible because they were taking place in the dark - thanks to that opacity which is the ideal breeding ground for the prosperity of the banking industry or otherwise referred to as bank secrecy.

The finance world brings pressure on the justice system and on the elected representatives everywhere in the world. Finance is the strongest assassin because without finance there would be no opacity (bank secrecy), no tax havens, nor currency transfers. This is why it is the most powerful assassin ever. Without finance, the hidden commissions would not be immune any more than any other acts of corruption. Is it worth remembering that bank secrecy only exists to avoid submission to the laws of the Republic?

Regardless of the sector of activity concerned, all the whistleblowers expose malfunctions which have brought large sums of money to the ones they accuse. These sums obviously transit through banks and most of the time the money was poured into undeclared offshore bank accounts.

Julian Assange and the whistleblower Rudolf Elmer during a press conference in London 

Tax Evasion

Senator Eric Bocquet explained that he had made the observation of the massive and significant scale of the damage of tax evasion when he began to be interested in the subject as a Rapporteur of the Committee of Inquiry into Tax Evasion at the Senate – 1,000 billion euros in tax evasion in Europe on a yearly basis. Otherwise, he realized the importance of the ‘Financial Engineering’ industry, which sets up tax optimization plans managed by specialists who organize a perfect tax evasion. He repeated these words to Pierre Gabas, a producer at Fayaprod at the beginning of 2017 with a comical expression “One has succeeded to legislate on the curve of the cucumber or of the banana and one is unable to legislate on taxes and social rights” by quoting the Oxfam NGO: “Eight billionaires in the world today, but sixty-two last year and three hundred and forty-eight three years ago possess as many assets as three and a half billion people. Poverty soars (…) whilst the largest banks have gained twenty-five billion in profits from tax havens this year”. “One euro out of four from the profits of the twenty largest European banks ends up in tax havens, i.e. twenty-fivebillion dollars in 2015. (…) Each citizen pays the price for this crime”. This ran as a headline on the Oxfam NGO web site on the eve of the world week of actions against tax evasion that started on Saturday, April 1^st,2017 on the occasion of the first anniversary of the publication of millions of documents disclosed from the Panamanian lawyer’s firm Mossack Fonseca.

During an informal encounter with the Socialist Deputy Gérard Filoche, we discussed tax evasion and my experience at UBS. Gérard Filoche did not mince his words when he brought up the subject of finance. He declared during the February 11^th, 2015 programme entitled ‘Un soir à la tour Eiffel’ (An Evening at the Eiffel Tower) that tax evasion in Europe is “twice the debt of all the countries within the Euro zone which would resolve the crisis. It would suffice to take the money back from the thieves. LuxLeaks: 2,400 billion euros from three hundred and forty companies among which fifty-eight French multinationals who, instead of paying taxes to our Republic, to allow help for unemployed people to find a job, to allow better hospitals, better schools