Hervé Falciani
| Hervé Falciani | |
|---|---|
Hervé Falciani in 2013
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| Born |
Hervé Daniel Marcel Falciani January 9, 1972 Monte Carlo, Monaco |
| Residence | Madrid, Spain |
| Nationality | |
| Alma mater | Sophia Antipolis |
| Occupation | Systems engineer |
| Known for | Lagarde list |
Hervé Daniel Marcel Falciani (Italian: [falˈtʃaːni]; born 9 January 1972) is a Franco-Italian systems engineer and whistleblower who is behind "the biggest banking leak in history." In 2008, Falciani began collaborating with numerous European nations by providing allegedly illegal stolen information relating to more than 130,000 suspected tax evaders with Swiss bank accounts – specifically those with accounts in HSBC's Swiss subsidiary HSBC Private Bank.
Falciani is the person behind the "Lagarde list", so called as it is a list of HSBC clients who allegedly used the bank to evade taxes and launder money that Falciani leaked to ex-French Minister of Finance Christine Lagarde, currently the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Lagarde, in turn, sent the list to governments whose citizens were on the list.
On 11 December 2014, Falciani was indicted in absentia by the Swiss federal government for violating the country's bank secrecy laws and for industrial espionage. The indictment accused Falciani of stealing information from HSBC's Geneva offices and passing it on to tax authorities in France. HSBC had been indicted in France for money laundering in November 2014. In November 2015, Switzerland’s federal court sentenced Falcini to five years in prison – the "longest sentence ever demanded by the confederation’s public ministry in a case of banking data theft". Falciani was accused of "aggravated financial espionage, data theft and violation of commercial and banking secrecy".
After studying at the Sophia Antipolis technology park, Falciani became a computer engineer at the Swiss branch of HSBC between 2001 and 2008. In 2006, he reorganized the database of the organization to improve its security. Falciani has declared that he realized that the way data was managed at HSBC fostered tax evasion, and proposed a new system, which was rejected by his superiors. After the HSBC reaction, and because he believed that "it is a systematic violation of fundamental rights of citizens by subtracting funds that should be allocated to the general interest", for two years Falciani collected evidence of potential tax fraud involving 130,000 individuals. Falciani tried to make the information available to the Swiss judicial authorities, but was unsuccessful. This claim was corroborated by French prosecutors.
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