MOSCOW, February 9 (RAPSI) – The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) claims that the Geneva branch of one of the world’s biggest banks, HSBC, kept secret accounts of criminals, including drug and arms dealers, and also helped its clients evade taxes, says the ICIJ statement released on Monday.

The ICIJ says in its report published following investigation of the bank’s performance that HSBC’s Swiss branch kept over $100 billion on more than 100,000 secret accounts. The Venezuelan government allegedly kept the largest amount of funds at the bank – $12.6 billion.

The bank’s systems specialist, Hervé Falciani, quit his job at HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) in 2008, taking along five CDs with a trove of secret information. The information eventually reached then Finance Minister of France Christine Lagarde, who shared it with other countries. The French newspaper Le Monde obtained the data as well, and shared it with the ICIJ.

The files which the ICIJ obtained cover a period until 2007 and include information about secret HSBC accounts and over 100,000 individual and corporate clients from more than 200 countries who kept them.

According to the files, Russian customers held a total of $1.7 billion on the HSBC accounts. In all, the files contain information about 740 clients from Russia who aggregately had 1,560 accounts at the bank.

IT specialist Hervé Falciani, who was transferred from HSBC Monaco to HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) in Geneva, was quickly tasked with implementing a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for the bank. It appears likely that at some stage he gained access to and collected secret bank data.