[1] A majority stake is held by Natural Le Coultre S.A. of art dealer and shipper Yves Bouvier.
[4][6] At the same time, banking secrecy was rolled back in Switzerland, following greater scrutiny on the country's role as a tax haven.
[11][12] Among its most prominent corporate clients was auction house Christie's, which rented more than a third of the Freeport's storage space until it pulled out in 2018,[5] and Deutsche Bank, which used it to store gold bullion worth $8.9 billion but stated it is no longer a customer there.
"[20] However, Freeport managers have admitted to having no knowledge of what is being stored inside the facility due to the strict policy of discretion with their clients.
"[23] In 2016, a UNESCO report on the protection of cultural heritage sites identified the Freeports in Geneva, Luxembourg and Singapore as a "possible problem for the protection of cultural property and its illicit trafficking" and warned that these facilities could be used "to store works of art from thefts, lootings or illicit excavations for resale in the black market...even many years later.