Unclaimed Treasure

Secrecy is more than just an honored tradition to the Swiss banker--it is also a potent lure to his clients. International merchants, grafting bureaucrats, tax dodgers, insecure Latin American chieftains--from all over the world they come to deposit their cash in Switzerland's 4,000 banks (one for every 1,360 citizens).

Some prefer regular accounts, but for the really nervous there is nothing quite as safe as a coded number account, since nobody but a Swiss bank's director and one or two top officers ever learns the identity of its owner. So stringent are the rules protecting depositors--bankers who violate them risk 20,000-franc fines ($4,577 ) and six months in jail--that relatives of Iraq's King Feisal could not touch his account after his assassination, and Argentina's deposed Dictator Juan Peron is still unable to get at the $60 million fortune reportedly cached by his late wife Eva.

To the horror of the black-suited money managers of Zurich and Geneva, the Swiss government is about to chisel a small chink in this wall of secrecy. Next month it plans to push through a law requiring banking organizations to surrender to a government bureau all information concerning assets belonging to "racially, politically or religiously persecuted foreigners or stateless persons." The bill is the result of long prompting from Israel, which is convinced that huge fortunes were left in Switzerland by Jews who later died in Hitler's gas chambers. Since accounts inactive for 20 years revert to the banks, Israel began urging the Swiss as far back as 1954 to do something about the unclaimed treasure.

Though the bill represents a radical departure, it still leaves a loophole as wide as a walk-in vault. Only the banks know the identity of their depositors, so it is up to the bankers to determine how many unclaimed accounts fit the description. Sure enough, some bankers quickly insisted that very little--perhaps only $1,000,000 or so--remains. Said one: "Most of this flight capital was repatriated in 1945 and 1946."

Bankers complained that the measure would hurt Switzerland's reputation as a haven for legally protected cash--however illegally it might have been acquired --but the government assured them that the same old secrecy would remain for all but the inactive accounts. Anyway, said one government official, it is important that "Switzerland should not get a reputation as a country trying to enrich itself with the fortunes of victims of horrendous persecutions."

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