This week, the Julius Baer bank in Zurich, Switzerland, successfully initiated new censorship blow against the internet – so, those who tried to reach wikileaks.org, a global website devoted to publishing leaked documents, failed to do it.
Wikileaks, the website that is managed by the group of people who wish to provide what they call an “untraceable and uncensorable†leaking machine to be used by dissidents worldwide, involves Tibetan, Chinese and Thai political campaigners, an Australian hacking author and many other ambiguous personalities. Not being the only site of this kind, it has however an impressive record since its launch in 2006.
Now, after all its loud publications including the 238-page manual Standard Operating Procedures used in the controversial prison of Guantánamo, and a secret 110-page draft report by the international investigators Kroll, which revealed allegations of massive corruption in Kenya, Wikileaks enraged the Julius Baer bank with posting the details of the bankers’ most secret trade information – the way how they hide the funds of their richest international clients in offshore trusts. This kind of information is very actual and very “hotâ€: in Germany, the federal intelligence service recently paid almost £4m for a disc containing similar details from the bank in Liechtenstein. After that, there were tax raids on hundreds of suspected persons, the disgrace of prominent businessmen, and a diplomatic collision with the Cayman Islands offshore jurisdiction.
The published files of the swiss bank, among other records, contain information on an anonymous British Virgin Islands company run by the Baer bank and called Seneford Investments. Nominee director of the BVI company was based in the Cayman Islands. In 1998, the swiss bank’s documents listed six bank accounts for the company, in Switzerland and in other jurisdictions, accounting in total $113m.
t is claimed that the real owner of BVI-domiciled Seneford Investments, who allegedly salted away more than $100m (£50m), is Lawrence Kadoorie’s family trust. Late Kadoorie is a Hong Kong millionaire, who received peer’s title from Margaret Thatcher in 1981. He made family’s fortunes through China Light and Power, which provides Hong Kong with electricity, and through a chain of hotels. Kadoorie’s son, Sir Michael, who still has major interests in the Hong Kong companies, did not respond to invitations to comment.
The federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered removal of the domain name, and banned further cicrulation of the documents. However, all the documents reappeared on Wikileak’s “mirror†sites, or even might be accessed by using the IP number instead the domain name. Further hearings on February 29 may fully change the original decision.