Credit Suisse: fresh legal worries linked to former rogue banker

Credit Suisse: not having the best year in its history. © Keystone / Ennio Leanza

Russian oligarch Vitaly Malkin plans to sue Credit Suisse for CHF500 million ($515 million) due to losses caused by a former employee of the bank, according to a newspaper report.

The SonntagsZeitung writes that Malkin is chasing the bank in connection with the shrinking of his fortune between 2007 and 2008. Malkin, a former business partner of ex-Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, also wants Credit Suisse to look in more detail into the activities of its former employee Patrice Lescaudron and to find out what happened to his money.

Lescaudron worked for Credit Suisse in Geneva, where he was responsible for handling wealthy clients from Eastern Europe. After being fired by the bank in 2015, the banker was sentenced to a five-year jail term in 2018 for fraud and forgery. He committed suicide in 2020.

Lone wolf

On Sunday, Credit Suisse told the SonntagsZeitung as well as the AFP news agency that it rejected the allegations raised by Malkin.

The bank said that not only had Lescaudron’s actions “not been damaging” to Malkin and his fortune, but various court cases had concluded that the rogue banker had acted alone and was “not helped by other [Credit Suisse] employees in his criminal activities”.

However, the fallout from the Lescaudron case is not over: in March, a court in Bermuda ruled that Ivanishvili had suffered losses of $553 million due to the banker’s placements – a verdict Credit Suisse plans to appeal. And earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that the Geneva public prosecutor had identified eight suspicious transactions between 2008 and 2014, which he believes were laundered through Credit Suisse, and which could be grounds for a legal indictment brought against the bank.