UBS Withholding 22,000 Pages in Nazi Accounts Probe, Investigator Says

(Bloomberg) — UBS Group AG is withholding more than 22,000 pages of documents from an independent probe into Credit Suisse’s handling of Nazi-linked accounts because the bank says they are legally privileged, the lawyer overseeing the investigation has told a US Senate committee.

UBS has further limited the scope of the probe and is reviewing an additional 388,000 pages for potential redaction, ombudsman Neil Barofsky wrote in a May 1 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is providing oversight of his investigation and published Barofsky’s letter on its website.

The figures give a fuller sense of how much documentation is still at stake in the current standoff between UBS and the Judiciary Committee and Barofsky, who are pressing for greater disclosure. The bank inherited this legal case after buying its ailing former rival Credit Suisse in 2023 and is looking to fend off further litigation. Senator Chuck Grassley, who heads the committee, has said the bank’s recent behavior calls “into question UBS’s candor to the committee and its commitment to a thorough investigation.”

A UBS spokesperson didn’t have immediate comment on Barofsky’s latest letter. The bank has not provided responses to the committee’s follow-up questions by its April 24 deadline and has failed to respond with a date when it will, said a spokeswoman for the Judiciary Committee. Grassley and other members of the panel grilled UBS executives on the issue at a hearing in February.

UBS said last month that it won’t hand over the stash of privileged documents for a probe into handling of Nazi-linked accounts after failing to win assurances from a US court that doing so wouldn’t expose it to new financial claims. At the time, it wasn’t clear how many pages were at stake in that trove of documents.

UBS had previously said that it was only holding back some 150 documents, each of which can run to many pages. They pertain to the 1990s and are legally privileged, the bank said, noting that it was sharing any World War II-era document attached to those privileged files. Overall, it has said it has shown an “unwavering commitment to this historical review,” withheld less than 0.1% of the total and had given Barofsky access to some 16.5 million documents.

The Zurich-based bank maintains that a 1999 settlement which saw Swiss banks pay victims of the Holocaust $1.25 billion was final and that the text of the agreement expressly protected it from any potential further liability — known or unknown at the time.

But Barofsky said those claims of privilege run contrary to the arrangement he had with the bank. “UBS has been withholding and redacting documents from my oversight on privilege grounds even though UBS committed in my engagement letter to provide me with unfettered access to all materials, subject only to restrictions required by law.”

Barofsky has said he would like to wrap up his final report into the investigation by the end of the year but that deadline may slip. UBS has set a deadline to wrap up its own probe by July 31 but, Barofsky says, it can only do that by narrowing the scope of the overall investigation.

Sticking to that date would inevitably mean excluding further investigation of “seven individuals and entities that were either linked to the Nazis or involved in the potential forced transfer or aryanization of Jewish-owned assets,” he wrote.

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