Hervé Daniel Marcel Falciani (Italian: [falˈtʃaːni]; born 9 January 1972) is a French-Italian systems engineer and whistleblower who is credited with "the biggest banking leak in history.
[6] 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.
[10] 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.
[11] 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.
After searching the address, the prosecutor of Nice, Eric de Montgolfier,[16] opened his own investigation, not against Falciani, but against alleged tax fraudsters appearing in the list.
[19] The Audiencia Nacional, given the ongoing collaboration between Spanish and French courts, decided not to extradite Falciani, the reason being that he had provided information indicative of "severely irregular" suspicious activity, and of illegal and criminal offenses.
He was released because in Spain there is no legal concept of bank secrecy, and information technology trade secrets can not be used to hide unlawful activities.
[31][32] Falciani claims he was kidnapped by Israeli Mossad agents in Geneva, who were seeking information on bank clients with Hezbollah ties.
[34] Regarding this allegation the Audiencia Nacional, a high court in Spain, stated that "this fact" (the court's quotation marks in reference to the allegation): appears somewhat confused and inconsistent with the factual story that we present, which do seem objectively specific episodes of provision of information and effective collaboration with authorities of other states, which indicates a determined attitude of Falciani and not an economic motivation.
Falciani (who was not named in the indictment, as is customary for Switzerland) was charged with stealing information from HSBC's Geneva offices and passing it on to French tax authorities.
[36] In an interview with the Indian television network NDTV, Falciani said that Switzerland indicted him as part of an "agenda" to stifle whistleblowers like himself who have exposed corruption in the Swiss banking industry.