By Desie Heita
WINDHOEK – Lawyers of Maurice Tempelsman say the American diamond tycoon and his company, Lazare Kaplan International, never had Swiss accounts with HSBC bank, which is currently under intense scrutiny over its banking procedures in Europe.
“Even the most perfunctory investigation would have revealed, neither LKI nor any of its subsidiaries (nor Mr Maurice Tempelsman, for that matter) are on the list of holders of such accounts, because no such accounts were in fact held by them,” Christian Merkling, the Cape Town lawyers for Lazare Kaplan International said in a statement to New Era.
European tax authorities are investigating HSBC to determine, among others, the extent to which the bank went to assist diamond traders to launder money and avoid paying taxes on money made from African diamonds, oil and other resources.
HSBC is under scrutiny following leaked documents that showed how the bank allowed rich people across the globe to avoid paying tax, as well as acting as the bank for criminals and people with questionable records.
The documents also revealed that some Namibians stashed away more than N$44.9 million in accounts with HSBC Private Bank in Switzerland, with accounts active in the period between 1988 and 2007. Twenty of the HSBC clients are associated with Namibia while about four either have Namibian passports or nationality, investigators say.
So far the investigations on how far HSBC helped diamond traders, who banked with them, avoid tax and launder money have revealed names of diamond institutions and business associates with direct connections to Tempelsman and Lazare Kaplan International as well as to Lev Leviev of Lev Leviev Diamonds both with interests in Namibia’s diamond-cutting industry. The names popped up in reports on the documents detailing HSBC’s conduct that attracted global attention last week.
Tempelsman is a sightholder through Lazare Kaplan Diamonds Namibia, which has a stake in Namdeb’s sightholder subsidiary, NamGem. Russian-Israeli tycoon Lev Leviev, owned a diamond-cutting and polishing plant in Namibia, but laid off its entire workforce in 2012 after its bid to buy rough gems from De Beers flopped. The company’s local subsidiary is now pursuing plans to mine phosphate off the Namibian coast.
Merkling adamantly said “any references to LKI would have stemmed solely from the fact that it was the victim of a criminal fraud by another party which was an account holder,” and “implicating the victim of a crime in the crime itself is an egregious, defamatory error that demands public correction”.
Even though it is not illegal to open a Swiss account and not all those who open such accounts have duplicitous intent, the leaked documents of HSBC money transactions and official internal correspondence clearly show that the Swiss bank deliberately ignored frequent warning signs among its array of diamond trade clients while actively helping some set up offshore companies to obscure their business dealings.
Last November, the Belgian authorities charged HSBC with fraud, money laundering and criminal conspiracy over the bank’s dealings with diamond dealers. They accused HSBC of “knowingly favouring and encouraging fiscal fraud, giving privileged clients access to offshore accounts, particularly in Panama and the [British] Virgin Islands”. HSBC said at the time that it would “co-operate to the fullest extent possible”.
The leaked documents provide an unprecedented glimpse inside the privileged and taciturn Swiss banking system for the rich, and how the HSBC bank maintained secrete bank accounts in a manner that is potentially illegal or unethical.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) obtained the documents via the French newspaper Le Monde. ICIJ’s vast network of journalists from 45 countries pored over the document cache to untangle what has become the most observed case of money laundering and tax evasion in Europe.
HSBC had acknowledge that it is “accountable for past compliance and control failures”, and says it has “taken significant steps over the past several years to implement reforms and exit clients who did not meet strict new HSBC standards, including those where we had concerns in relation to tax compliance”.