Suicidal Bankers?

Last week Reuters reported the apparent suicide of Alex Widmer, the Chief Executive Officer of Bank Julius Baer, the Swiss bank with over $300 billion in assets invested ('hidden') on behalf of extremely wealthy individuals and institutions.


Alex Widmer

Bankers always seem to top themselves during times of recession and perhaps the suicide had something to do with bank’s loss of some 60 percent of its share price during 2008. But then things are rarely that simple in the murky world of international banking and a quick root around on Wikileaks (the best online source for all things leaked) turfed up some juicy little titbits.

In February, Bank Julius Baer attempted, unsuccessfully, to sue Wikileaks over whistleblower revelations concerning Baer's internal tax avoidance plan in the Cayman Islands for companies such as the Carlyle Group - a multinational conglomerate that invests in heavily governmental regulated industries such as defence. The Carlyle Group has been called the ‘ex president’s club’ by The Guardian because of the impressive list of former politicians that work or have worked for the company - including President Bush (junior and senior), ex US secretary of state James Baker, ex UK PM John Major, one-time World Bank treasurer Afsaneh Masheyekhi, Frank Carlucci the Former Secretary of Defence and Deputy Director of the CIA, Fidel Valdez Ramos former President of the Philippines and… the list goes on and on.


Bush senior visits Saudi Arabia on behalf of the Carlyle Group

You'll know If you’ve seen Fahrenheit 911 that among the Carlyle Group's investors were the Bin Laden family, who, thanks to their investment in one of the Carlyle Group's defence funds, benefitted very nicely from the Twin Towers attacks as the US increased its defence spending in the run up to war. Murky!

What all this may or may not have to do with poor Widmer’s death, we have no idea. However, a quick look at some of the bankers that have 'committed suicide’ during past recessions and economic downturns, gives us some indication as to the intrigue that, for all we know, may be lurking in this affair for anyone brave or foolhardy enough to investigate. Here is a short list of the best suicidal bankers:

 

Roberto Calvi hanging from the scaffolding underneath Blackfriars Bridge
Roberto Calvi

Roberto Calvi was an Italian banker who was found by a postman hanging from the scaffolding underneath Blackfriers Bridge in June 1982. He was weighed down by bricks and had £15,000 in different currencies in his pockets.

Calvi was dubbed by the press as ‘God's banker’ because of his close ties to the Vatican. The day before his body was found, he had been stripped of his position as chairman of Italy's second largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, due to a massive financial scandal that led to the bank going under with a then staggering $1.4 billion debt. He had been due to appear in an Italian court of appeal, having previously been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for his role in the disappearance of several billion lire from the bank.

It has been claimed that Calvi used Banco Ambrosiano to launder heroin money for the mafia and that he siphoned off money via the Vatican Bank, which was Banco Ambrosiano's main shareholder. In 1984, the Vatican Bank agreed to pay US$224 million to the 120 creditors of the failed Banco Ambrosiano as a “recognition of moral involvement” in the bank's collapse.


Licio Gelli
Claims have been made that Calvi's death involved the Vatican Bank, the Mafia, and the Italian illegal Masonic lodge, Propaganda Due or P2. One of the most influential figures in the Calvi story was Licio Gelli, now 84. He was Grand Master of the P2 Masonic lodge and was sentenced to 12 years for fraud in connection with the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano.

P2 was sometimes referred to by Italians as a "shadow government" and the lodge had among its members prominent journalists, parliamentarians, industrialists, and military leaders - including the then-future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Savoy pretender to the Italian throne Victor Emmanuel and the heads of all three Italian intelligence services.

Members of P2 referred to themselves as frati neri or "black friars". This has led to a suggestion in some quarters that Calvi was murdered and his body left hanging under Blackfriars Bridge as a Masonic warning because of symbolism associated with the word "Blackfriars".

City of London police pronounced Calvi’s death a suicide after an investigation that lasted no more than a week. It has been suggested that it was a Masonic influence that led the City police to issue this conclusion.


Oleg Zhukovsky
In December 2007 Oleg Zhukovsky, the deputy chairman of the Russian banking giant VTB, was discovered dead in a swimming pool at his dacha outside Moscow. State television suggested suicide despite the fact that his hands and feet were tied.

VTB, headed by Andrei Kostin (a close friend of Putin), is the country’s second-largest bank, after Sberbank, but its share prices had been falling dramatically, prompting outrage from minority shareholders who had expected the government to support the stock.


Murder scene of Andrei Kozlov
However, it has been suggested that Zhukovsky’s death is more likely connected to his involvement in Russia’s timber industry. Zhukovsky was responsible for lending billions to the logging industry, which has reportedly been the scene of a turf war between individuals connected to the Kremlin groups. On May 15, Russia’s Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev reported that more than half of the wood in Russia is obtained through illegal means.

Russian bankers have a hard time of it. In October 2006, another VTB employee Alexander Plokhin was shot dead at his home in Moscow in an apparent contract killing. A month before that Andrei Kozlov, the deputy chairman of the Central Bank, was killed as he left the Spartak Moscow football stadium. Kozlov’s job was to clean up the country's utterly corrupt banking sector. He had oversight of some 1,200 banks, dozens of which he suspected of being money-laundering fronts.

Heinrich Kieber


Heinrich Kieber
Although not dead yet, Heinrich Kieber, the ex-employee of the LGT bank of Liechtenstein, has said that he is fearful for his life. Liechtenstein is a landlocked alpine microstate tax haven bordered by Switzerland and Austria. In February of this year Kieber sold Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, for a reported €4.2 million ($6.47 million), several DVDs with data on 1,400 Germans, many of whom had invested their money in foundations in Liechtenstein to circumvent German taxation. Among those embroiled in the scandal was Klaus Zumwinkel, the chairman of the German postal group Deutsche Post, who had his home and offices raided and was forced to step down.

Kieber, who lives in hiding, recently requested a new identity out of fears he may be killed by powerful foreigners and despots who held accounts at the LGT bank. Members of the Saudi royal family are said to be among LGT’s customers as well as former Indonesian dictator Suharto, who died in January and who Indonesian justice authorities claimed illegally funnelled more than a billion Euros into foreign accounts.