PRIVACY ORIENTED | From the age of BIG BROTHER – greetings!

Published 10 February, 2010, 08:38
Edited 11 February, 2010, 11:16

Russia Today

The European Parliament is debating an agreement that allows the banking data of its citizens to be scrutinized by American officials.

Washington says this measure is vital to counter terrorism, but many in Europe see it as an invasion of privacy.

In a deal that came into force temporarily last Monday, the EU and the US are sharing banking data conducted through the SWIFT money transferring system. For supporters, including the US government, it seems a key part of the fight against the financing of international terrorism

But a large body of members of the European Parliament sees it as an infringement of the basic rights of EU citizens. They are worried about how much banking information is going to be revealed, how long it is to be stored and the potential for information to be misused or transferred to a third country.

The members of the European Parliament are due to debate the deal on Wednesday and take a final vote on Thursday. Some of the parliamentarians are already dissatisfied with the fact they have not been given the eight weeks they are supposed to have to consider such a deal.

Member of European Parliament Jan Philipp Albrecht claims that the principals of protection of fundamental rights, especially data protection, are not fully considered in the agreement about the SWIFT-data with the US.

“The breaking point regarded what the Council is doing now is about the access of the EU citizens to the US court, it’s about implementing an independent data protecting supervisor’s right to review and so on,” Albrecht told RT. “It’s really important for us to be implemented, so, we think there has to be a general debate before deciding, therefore, we can’t decide at this moment. We want a debate about the fundamental principles in the security cooperation and at the moment the parliament is united about saying this.”

A Dutch member of the European Parliament Sophia in ‘t Veld has said the EU parliament in large majority has very serious concerns whether this agreement is fully in line with the rules on data protection and fundamental rights.

“This parliament expressed concerns on various occasions in recent years. And we are not pleased with the way that the council – that is the European member state governments – are trying to push this through,” Sophia in ‘t Veld noted. “They are trying to sideline the EU parliament and since the 1st of December, in a procedure under the new Lisbon Treaty, where the EU parliament has to give its consent to such an agreement. We feel that the European Council should be much more forthcoming and give us access to all the relevant information that we need in order to take a well-founded decision.”

Latin Letter by Derek Sambrook of Trust Services, S.A. for Offshore Investment Magazine
February 2010

The Spirit of Palmerston

More than a century ago, during Great Britain’s hey day, it was said that Britannia both ruled the waves and waived the rules. As the 19th century British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, stated: “we have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”. Lord Palmerston’s dictum is itself eternal and perpetual – and has international application; only the superpowers, not those sentiments, change.

Latin America’s leading banking centre, Panama, understands Lord Palmerston’s view, not because it is a world power, but because, great or small, all countries (as with individuals) will usually not place others before their own interests. It is in this spirit that the Panamanian government is approaching the transparency demands of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in relation to the thorny issue of taxation and in doing so, the government has emphasised its intention to be a responsible member of the international community; nonetheless, as Dulcidio de la Guardia, Panama’s Vice-Minister of Finance has put it, the country will “always take care of its interests”.

In a complete reversal of fortune since dictator Manuel Noriega’s forced removal over 20 years ago, Panama’s banks are today well regulated and its Financial Analysis Unit is a member of the Egmont Group (made up of a global collection of national agencies) which enjoys a good reputation. Its common goal is to facilitate information exchange, training and sharing of expertise in the battle against financial crimes. Panama’s enthusiasm is best illustrated by the fact that it ranks fourth among 30 countries surveyed by the Financial Action Task Force (a body set up over 20 years ago by the Group of Seven, a collection of developed countries) because of the efforts it has made to enforce anti-money laundering measures. And unlike the Cayman Islands, which eschews imposing personal income taxes (despite its present financial problems), Panama has always taxed income earned within its borders (27% for individuals and 30% for corporations).

Panama’s government does not favour the ubiquitous tax information exchange agreements of the sort that have been signed in great haste by a number of offshore financial centres; they bring no benefit whatsoever for Panama because with its territorial tax system, it has no interest in foreign income earned. Instead, the government wants to sign double taxation treaties which will not only conform with the spirit of the OECD’s tax information sharing policy, but will actually attract foreign investment to Panama; presently, no tax relief can be claimed against Panamanian taxes imposed on a foreigner’s local profits. This removes the one-way street benefit for foreign governments perhaps appropriate where the information requests involve jurisdictions only offering beaches and attractive legislation but this does not apply in Panama’s case.

It is a common mistake to draw direct comparisons between Panama and such jurisdictions whereas the country’s canal, with its vital international commercial role, is but one example of this error; geopolitics would be another but would require a separate article. Ships can always go round an island, but to profit most from international trade many ships have no choice but to pass through the canal. The canal, in fact, was the cause of a terrible blunder on the part of Ferdinand de Lesseps (the French diplomat who built the Suez Canal) who compared Egypt with Panama. Work commenced before it became clear that constructing a sea-level canal through the flat Egyptian sand (a canal, I would add, which I have passed through) was an entirely different enterprise. The French canal may not have been created but perhaps the longest palindrome phrase in the English language was: A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.
Mistakes aside, whilst much of the OECD transparency tactics can be criticised, I am readily aware that many of the critics haven’t got an unbiased bone in their bodies. They are usually professionals who make their living (as your columnist does) from the steady stream of people and businesses lured by the attractions on offer in offshore financial service centres. Jason Sharman, however, does not fit this description because he is a political scientist at Griffith University in Australia.

His findings summon the spectre of hypocrisy raised in my column one year ago this month (Man, Angels & Brazil – Issue 193) only this time the culprit is the United States of America state of Nevada, not Delaware. The professor found that Nevada’s corporate system offered both light reporting and disclosure requirements – not to mention a quick one-hour incorporation service. In a state with a population of less than three million, Nevada apparently forms about 80,000 new businesses a year with the total now standing at over 400,000. It is understood that when the US Internal Revenue Service undertook a study it discovered that between 50% and 90% of those registering Nevada companies were in breach of federal tax laws elsewhere. Panama, on the other hand, has just over three million citizens and registers perhaps just a little over half the number of companies each year that Nevada does and, like Panama, Nevada does not reveal the names of shareholders.

Armed with USD10,000 in funding and Google as a research partner, Jason Sharman undertook a study of international money laundering; his findings will sit uncomfortably with the OECD. What he found onshore was often a lack of concern in even knowing who the clients were: copy passports and references? Forget them. And, of course, for the people behind the structures, there is no fear of a UBS backlash – personified by the revelations of its former employee, Bradley Birkenfeld – because these middlemen, unlike Swiss bankers and other responsible offshore professionals around the world, were not concerned with knowing who was behind the companies. The professor’s research led him to conclude that the US, and some other OECD members, were far more lax in their due diligence than, say, Switzerland or Liechtenstein.

45 attempts were made by Jason Sharman to create anonymous offshore companies, including bank accounts for them, around the world. These efforts were successful in 17 cases and in 13 of them the country involved was an OECD member. In the United Kingdom, after under an hour on the internet and for less than USD800 without providing identification, he formed an anonymous company and was provided with bearer shares, nominee directors and a secretary. He found, however, that service providers in centres such as Bermuda, the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, Liechtenstein and Panama were careful with their due diligence.

An ex-UK Foreign Office adviser (and a former colleague of mine), Rodney Gallagher, suggested in the Financial Times (18 November 2009) that at the end of the day only those offshore jurisdictions with political clout or the support of large countries (such as China) are likely to survive; he includes Hong Kong, the Gulf States, Singapore and Panama on that list.

In the case of Panama this fits in with the views expressed also last November by Susan Haird, Deputy Chief Executive of UK Trade and Investment, a government agency, when she visited the country and with whom I met as Chairman of the Panama-British Business Association (PBBA). She sees Panama as a source of future business for UK companies and believes that “Panama’s strategic position in the world makes it an important trading partner for the UK”. She was the keynote speaker at Britannica Day, a British trade-related event, which is held in Panama every year and organised by the local British Embassy in conjunction with the PBBA.

Panama’s Deputy Minister of Economy and Finance, Mr Frank De Lima, also attended Britannica Day and from discussions I had with him, it would seem that the Panamanian government understands that any tax treaties must be framed sensibly and include the necessary safeguards to deflect attempts to obtain information outside rules which call for evidence and exclude fishing expeditions. It must be why, as head of the delegation who attended tax treaty meetings with Mexico, the Deputy Minister confirmed that the negotiations came to a happy ending and that a treaty should ensue.

Britannia may no longer rule the waves, but she still has her day once a year in Panama. UK exports to the country in 2008 almost reached USD250,000 million and I predict that these are destined to grow steadily every year. After all, in President Martinelli, Panama appears to have the man and the plan.

Cory Doctorow / Boing Boing
POSTED AT 10:11 PM January 25, 2010

“Buying You: The Government’s Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data about ‘The People’,” a paper by Columbia Law School’s Joshua L. Simmons in the Columbia Business Law Review, describes the way that US government agencies circumvent the fourth amendment and privacy statutes by outsourcing their surveillance to private credit reporting bureaux and other mega-databases. He argues that the law should ban the use of this improperly gathered information, binding paid government informants to the same rules that the government must follow.

Your information is for sale, and the government is buying it at alarming rates. The CIA, FBI, Justice Department, Defense Department, and other government agencies are at this very moment turning to a group of companies to provide them information that these companies can gather without the restrictions that bind government intelligence agencies. The information is gathered from sources that few would believe the government could gain unfettered access to, but which, under current Fourth Amendment doctrine and statutory protections, are completely accessible.Fourth-parties, such as ChoicePoint or LexisNexis, are private companies that aggregate data for the government, and they comprise the private security-industrial complex that arose after the attacks of September 11, 2001. They are in the business of acquiring information, not from the information’s originator (the first-party), nor from the information’s anticipated recipient (the second-party), but from the unavoidable digital intermediaries that transmit and store the information (third-parties). These fourth-party companies act with impunity as they gather information that the government wants but would be unable to collect on its own due to Fourth Amendment or statutory prohibitions. This paper argues that when fourth-parties disclose to law enforcement information generated as a result of searches that would be violations had the government conducted the searches itself, those fourth-parties’ actions should be considered searches by agents of the government, and the data should retain privacy protections.

Buying You: The Government’s Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data about ‘The People’ (via Resource Shelf)

LibertyReserve.com has fallen off it’s throne as the most private (and thus best) digital currency. It is no longer a good option for private payments. This is not actually news – it happened some time ago. It happened when Liberty Reserve instituted their new CAPTCHA for logins. They lost the trust of the financial privacy loving world that uses Liberty Reserve because now they can surreptitiously “captcha” your real IP address if you’re using a proxy, and there’s not much you can do about it.

They gave no reason for changing their CAPTCHA to an a flash version. Indeed, there was no reason to do so, unless it was to track users to link accounts and build profiles for network analysis. Anyone know how to get around this? Clue me in folks!

Further, they block some tor IP addresses, and seem to be generally hostile to tor and proxies.

That combined with being offline from DDOS attacks, seemingly anomalous and ridiculous login, access and account problems with their site, such as the examples below, make LR no longer really useful from a privacy perspective. I’ve actually had experience with some of these problems, myself.

Cant login to LR, please, help! @ Talkgold

www.libertyreserve.com down for days? @ Talkgold

Cant open liberty reserve? @ Talkgold

LR kicks me out when I log in. Anyone else have this problem? @ Talkgold

Liberty Reserve’s Shady Business Practices. Took my money – no support @ Talkgold

To top it all off, Liberty Reserve does not provide any type of audit or proof of an audit on their holdings that supposedly back their digital currencies (USD, EUR and gold bullion). Where’s the “reserve” in that?

Jack Grocott / International Tax Review
January 19, 2010

The OECD has moved one step closer to maintaining a global standard for tax information exchange by unveiling a schedule for the organisation’s peer review mechanism.

Speaking at a press conference this morning, Jeffrey Owens, head of the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, told how the first peer review will take place in six weeks.

The peer reviews will be used to ensure that jurisdictions are fully transparent and are adhering to international standards.

Owens outlined that over the past three months, the OECD has established a global group on tax transparency which will consist of the countries that are members of the organisation’s Global Forum on Tax Transparency and Information Exchange. This new group will meet regularly in the guise of its 15-member steering group or its 30-member peer review group.

“All members of the forum, as well as jurisdictions identified by them as relevant to its work, will undertake reviews of the implementation of their systems for the exchange of information of tax matters,” said Owens.

This will take place in two phases. Phase one reviews will assess the quality of a jurisdiction’s legal and regulatory framework for the exchange of information, while phase two will look at practical operation of that framework.

“All jurisdictions will undergo a phase one review before June 2012 and all phase two reviews should be completed before June 2014,” Owens added.

The first peer review will be chaired by France. It is not known which country will be reviewed.

Owens also explained that since last April’s G20 meeting of world leaders in London, 195 tax information exchange agreements have been signed and that 19 countries have been added to the list of countries that have fully implemented the international standard for information exchange.

However, Owens took offence at the use of the term ‘white list’ when defining fully compliant countries.

“I do not like the phrase white list because it suggests that those countries are off the hook. Even white list countries will be subject to scrutiny from the OECD,” he said.

Owens provided an update on the OECD’s effort to improve compliance with the international tax standard.

Speaking about the minimum requirement to sign 12 tax information exchange agreements, Owens said: “This is not just a numbers game and we are seeing changes in attitude to non-compliant jurisdictions. People now know that failing to adhere to international standards is not acceptable and governments are beginning to tackle the problem in a more targeted and effective way.”

Owens concluded the press briefing by praising the work undertaken in recent months by several jurisdictions to adhere to international standards. He singled out Hong Kong:”They kept their promise to meet our international standards, ” he said.

Two weeks ago, Hong Kong passed a law enabling the country to adopt standards for information exchange.

Before this law, the territory was unable to adopt the international standard as the country’s Inland Revenue Department could only collect taxpayers’ information for domestic purposes.

VALENTINA POP / EUObserver
18.01.2010 @ 09:28 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The European Parliament is threatening to derail an interim agreement allowing US authorities to track European bank transactions in terrorism investigations unless certain concessions are made.

The president of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek at the end of last week sent a second letter to the Spanish EU presidency asking for more information on the so-called Swift agreement.

“We have not received any answers to the first letter, sent in December to both the [outgoing] Swedish and the [incoming] Spanish EU presidencies,” a spokesman for Mr Buzek said.

A plenary debate on the matter is scheduled for Wednesday in Strasbourg, during which the Spanish presidency is expected to give more answers on the technicalities of the deal.

The agreement would allow US prosecutors and investigators to tap into intra-European bank transactions as part of anti-terrorist enquiries – something EU lawmakers say raises privacy concerns.

The parliament can still scrap the agreement, even after it comes into force on 1 February, pending the lawmakers’ “consent.” A final deal should be negotiated by the end of the year, together with the EU parliament.

“In order for Parliament to be in a position to give its consent or not, it had laid down two clear conditions, namely that Parliament is granted full access to information related to this interim agreement and that its concerns are fully reflected in the negotiating mandate for the longer term agreement required once the interim agreement expires at the end of October,” a press release by the Liberal group in the EU legislature reads.

The Liberals have spearheaded the issue, with their leader, Guy Verhofstadt, indicating that he has the support of other groups to “reject the agreement altogether” if the Spanish EU presidency does not come forward with some concession.

The interim deal was sealed by EU justice ministers on 30 November last year, just one day before the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty – rules granting the EU legislature more powers in the field of justice and home affairs.

At the time lawmakers criticised the “rush” to sign the deal, while the US pointed to the fact that the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) was about to stop storing data on European transactions on US soil by the end of 2009.

If parliament took the controversial step of refusing to give its consent, the US would no longer have access to intra-EU transactions – something that would strain relations between Brussels and Washington, especially in the wake of the Christmas Day bomb plot in Detroit.

Swift in 2006 was thrust into the centre of an EU-US dispute after it emerged that the American authorities had been secretly using information on European transactions as part of their so-called War on Terror.

A Belgium-based company, Swift, kept a database on US territory, giving Washington a legal handle on its global activities.

The company records international transactions worth trillions of dollars daily, between nearly 8,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries.

“From 1 January, we have changed the architecture of the Swift network, keeping intra-European traffic in Europe – one database in the Netherlands and a mirror database in Switzerland,” Euan Sellar, a spokesman for the company told EUobserver.

He said Swift is “currently waiting” to hear the legal details of the agreement, noting that the US authorities had no mandate to ask for European transactions. “We’ll have to see once the deal comes into force, if it’s legally binding, we will comply,” he said.

Meanwhile, US officials, asking not to be named, told this website that the EU parliament had been regularly informed of the importance of having such data made available to anti-terrorist investigators.

“We prefer to use the ‘Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme’ label instead of Swift, because there are several other companies involved as well,” one US official said.

As to the final agreement, Washington is hoping the EU parliament will “move swiftly” so that the deal is in force by the end of October when the interim agreement expires.

Published on January 18, 2010 by EU News Network (EUNewsNet.com and OfficialWire) BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

A interim deal allowing U.S. authorities to access data on European bank transactions requires adjustments, a European Parliamentary group said.

The Liberal caucus of the European Parliament said in a press release that “two clear conditions,” must be met for legislators to give final consent to the Swift agreement, which is named after the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a firm that tracks trillions of dollars of transactions each day involving 8,000 financial firms around the world, the EUobserver reported Monday.

It was discovered in 2006 that U.S. authorities had secretly used Swift information in the war on terror, taking advantage of a Swift data bank that was set up on U.S. soil in Washington, D.C.

Swift has since sequestered its data, keeping European data in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The European Parliament still needs to give final consent to the agreement struck in November that gives U.S. authorities access to Swift data.

The Liberal caucus said, “Parliament (needed ) … full access to information related to this interim agreement” and an agreement in advance that its concerns are carried over to the long term Swift treaty.

PanamaLaw.org
January 20, 2010

Executive Summary – This is absolutely amazing in a bad way. The Brussels agreement which has gone into law lets the USA access any and all bank records of any bank account in any EU country. This law comes into force in two months time.

The 27 EU countries have to grant this access to the US under the terrorist finance-tracking program contained in the Brussels Agreement and this is a done deal. The USA is allowed to keep the bank records for five years. The privacy invasive scheme uses the SWIFT system to scan for transactions they deem suspicious and then they request individual bank records. They can request general data sets, which are commonly referred to as a fishing expedition.

Here is a list of the 27 EU countries affected:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Bulgaria
• Cyprus
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Estonia
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Italy
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Malta
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Portugal
• Romania
• Slovakia
• Slovenia
• Spain
• Sweden
• United Kingdom

Discussion – First thing to remember that this treaty is between the 27 EU states and the USA. The USA has greater power to access bank records than the police authorities in each of the given countries. No probable cause is neither needed, nor judicial review. Any country friendly with the EU can request the USA to get the bank records for them in return for favors. So the EU has now bowed to the USA. Doom and gloom for the EU.

Banking Implications – Of the 27 countries mostly Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, UK, Sweden, and Cypress are being used for offshore banking. If people using these jurisdictions wish to maintain any privacy they need to leave there for friendlier jurisdictions. Their window of opportunity is two months. It sounds like bank records pre-dating the effective date of the Brussels Agreement would not be covered.

Mark Nestmann / Sovereign Soceity
(December 30, 2009)

From his home in the quiet village of Rorbas, outside Zurich, Rudolf M. Elmer is chipping away at the centuries-old traditions of Swiss banking secrecy.

Rudolf M. Elmer ran the Caribbean operations of the Swiss bank Julius Baer for eight years until he was dismissed in 2002.

Mr. Elmer, who ran the Caribbean operations of the Swiss bank Julius Baer for eight years until he was dismissed in 2002, moved to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and began parceling out to global tax authorities what he said were the secrets of his former employer.

Now back in his native country, he continues to disclose the inner workings of Julius Baer — one of many Swiss institutions that investigators say help clients evade billions of dollars in taxes by routing money through offshore havens in the Caribbean and Switzerland.

“It is a global problem, and I am only the messenger who provides the bad news, or even better, the truth,” Mr. Elmer, 54, wrote in a recent e-mail message. “Offshore tax evasion is the biggest theft among societies and neighbor states in this world.”

He said that he would fly on Tuesday to Düsseldorf, Germany, where the tax authorities are putting him up in a five-star hotel as he prepares to divulge client secrets.

Mr. Elmer joins a group of whistle-blowers that includes Bradley Birkenfeld, the former UBS private banker who disclosed the bank’s secrets, pushing it toward a settlement with the United States government, and Heinrich Kieber, a former data clerk at the LGT Group, the Liechtenstein royal bank, who stole client data and funneled it to American and European authorities.

Mr. Elmer’s disclosures are attracting particular interest as the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department embark upon a strategy of “it takes a rogue to catch a thief” to encourage insiders who engaged in wrongdoing to reveal the secrets of their employers.

Lawyers and Congressional investigators who have begun to review Mr. Elmer’s claims say that his internal bank and client documents provide fresh ammunition for American authorities as they take their crackdown on offshore tax evasion beyond UBS to clients of other banks.

Mr. Elmer has given documents to the I.R.S., a Senate subcommittee investigating tax evasion and investigators for Robert M. Morgenthau, then the Manhattan district attorney, his lawyer Jack Blum said. They cover more than 100 trusts, dozens of companies and hedge funds and more than 1,300 individuals, from 1997 through 2002, Mr. Blum said.

Mr. Elmer contends that his documents detail the undisclosed role of American investment management companies in funneling American, European and South American clients who wished to avoid taxes to Julius Baer; the backdating of documents to establish trusts and foundations used to evade taxes; and the funneling of trades for hedge funds and private equity firms from high-tax jurisdictions through Baer entities in the Cayman Islands.

“What he has is the confirmation of something very important: that a number of other banks in the voluntary disclosure process are turning up,” Mr. Blum said, referring to 14,700 wealthy Americans, many of them UBS clients, who came forward to disclose their secret accounts last year. The I.R.S. declined to comment on Mr. Elmer’s case but said in a statement that it was “investigating other banks that have enabled Americans to evade taxes.”

Nothing indicates that Julius Baer, a 120-year-old private bank, is under I.R.S. investigation. The bank is known for intense privacy. Its board chairman, Raymond J. Baer, told shareholders last April that “the fiction of citizens being fully transparent must never become reality.”

Julius Baer, based in Zurich, had profits of more than $245 million in the first half of 2009 on more than $200 billion in client assets. In 2004, it sold its American wealth management business to UBS, whose offshore private banking operations for Americans came under federal scrutiny and led the bank to pay a $780 million fine in 2009 and admit to criminal wrongdoing. The acquired business was folded into a group led by Raoul Weil, the top UBS private banker who fled to Switzerland in 2009, after being indicted in the UBS case touched off by Mr. Birkenfeld.

Mr. Elmer worked for Julius Baer nearly two decades, the first 15 years in Switzerland and then as chief operating officer of Julius Baer Bank and Trust in Grand Cayman, beginning in 1994. As far as his own role in helping clients evade taxes, he said, “I didn’t realize what was going on.” Mr. Elmer said he discovered the tax evasion in 2002 and decided to expose Julius Baer’s operations.

Julius Baer denies that version of events. It contends that Mr. Elmer stole internal documents and client data around 2002, the year he was dismissed after raising concerns about the bank in the wake of being passed over for a promotion. He moved to Mauritius a year later.

“Shortly after leaving the employment of the Julius Baer Group in 2002, Cayman-based Elmer, clearly annoyed at having been dismissed and unable to secure a financial settlement to his satisfaction, engaged in a campaign to seek to discredit the Julius Baer group and certain of its clients,” the bank wrote by e-mail in December.

“This campaign has included threats against individuals and the use of documents inappropriately obtained and/or retained by Elmer following the termination of his employment, many of which were altered to create a distorted fact pattern or supplemented by forged documents, the creation of which Elmer has since admitted,” the bank wrote.

Swiss authorities, who briefly held Mr. Elmer in jail in 2005 on charges of breaching Swiss bank secrecy laws, are investigating whether he stole the documents.

In 2008, Mr. Elmer posted some of his documents on Wikileaks, a Web site that publishes whistle-blower information about government and corporate activity. In court papers the bank filed in February of that year, seeking unsuccessfully to prevent the disclosure of the records, the bank revealed the names of certain clients that Mr. Elmer had accused of tax evasion. They include Jonathan Lampitt, the president and chief executive of the Jupiter Investment Group, in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.; Winston B. Layne, a wealthy resident of New York; and Anna Kanellakis, an owner of a shipping company, Alpha Tankers and Freighters, based in Athens. A spokesman for Mr. Lampitt did not respond to requests for comment. Messages left at Mr. Layne’s Upper East Side home were not answered. A spokesman for Alpha Tankers said that it knew nothing about accounts at Julius Baer.

Elements of the dispute between Mr. Elmer and Julius Baer resemble a spy thriller. He said that Julius Baer had him followed by private investigators in Zurich and that superiors told him “it might be a good idea to go for a deep dive in the sea” — assertions that the bank denies.

The bank said it suspected Mr. Elmer of having mailed a suspicious white powder to its offices, which he denies. It also said that he forged a 2007 document on Julius Baer letterhead notifying Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany that the bank was closing her accounts because they “hid funds in offshore accounts.” Mr. Elmer says the letter, which he has posted on Wikileaks, is authentic.

His actions are “symptomatic of a generalized breakdown of bank secrecy,” said Christopher S. Rizek, a tax lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington who has represented scores of wealthy American clients of Swiss banks.