Sat, Mar 21, 2015

(Bloomberg) -- Tunisia asked to join the Geneva prosecutor’s money-laundering case into HSBC Holdings Plc’s Swiss unit as a plaintiff in a bid to get back funds it says were embezzled by former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

The request “is part of efforts by Tunisian authorities to recover the proceeds of crimes” committed by Ben Ali and other members of his “clan,” according to a copy of the filing by Crettol & Associates, the Geneva law firm representing the Tunisian government.

The prosecutor opened an investigation into HSBC and searched its offices in the Swiss city on Feb. 18, after reports by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that the bank did business with arms dealers, blood-diamond traffickers and other criminals. The ICIJ’s report drew on account data of more than 100,000 people that was stolen by former HSBC Geneva employee Herve Falciani.

Ben Ali was president of Tunisia from November 1987 until he was ousted by a popular uprising in January 2011 and fled to Saudi Arabia with his wife and family. He was sentenced in absentia in 2012 to life in prison for complicity in the deaths of protesters during the uprising.

The equivalent of at least 160 million Swiss francs ($161 million) were paid into several HSBC accounts linked to the Ben Ali family, according to Yves Klein, one of the lawyers representing Tunisia. About 40 million francs still in those accounts was frozen by Swiss authorities, he said.

Henri Della Casa, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, confirmed it had received the request from Tunisia. Patrick Humphris, a spokesman for HSBC’s private banking unit, declined to comment.

No one answered calls placed to the Tunisian embassy in Switzerland or the Ministry of Justice in Tunis.

Swiss authorities have been criticized for their slow response to the HSBC leaks and for targeting data thief Falciani instead of the alleged money laundering the stolen account information revealed. The Swiss attorney general Michael Lauber has said that bank secrecy laws prevented him from using stolen data as evidence in an investigation. Falciani was indicted by the Swiss in December on charges of industrial espionage and violating bank secrecy.

Swiss justice has moved this week on other fronts. The canton of Geneva on March 17 said it was returning $380 million confiscated from Swiss accounts belonging to former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha to the government of the West African nation. The Swiss attorney general said the next day that it had frozen $400 million in more than 30 banks tied to its probes of money laundering related to the corruption scandal at Petroleo Brasileiro SA. It released $120 million of those funds for repatriation to Brazil.

The government of Tunisia estimates its damages at at least 123 million francs, according to the partly redacted document filed with the Geneva prosecutor on Thursday. Tunisia’s lawyers are seeking to investigate any further evidence of HSBC’s failure to abide by Swiss money-laundering regulations, according to the document. In 2013, the Swiss financial regulator found HSBC’s monitoring controls were ineffective in overseeing the Ben Ali-related accounts.