Swiss bank issues legal request to stem information leaks after FT story on lending unit. Credit Suisse has asked hedge funds and other investors to destroy documents relating to its richest clients’ yachts and private jets, in an attempt to stop information leaking about a unit of the bank that has made loans to oligarchs who were later sanctioned. Investors this week received letters from the Swiss bank requesting that they destroy the documents relating to a securitisation of loans backed by “jets, yachts, real estate and/or financial assets”, according to three people whose firm received the request. The letters tell the investors to “destroy and permanently erase” any confidential information Credit Suisse previously provided in relation to the transaction, citing a “recent data leak to the media” that it said had been “verified by our investigators”. Credit Suisse took the action after a Financial Times report last month detailing how it offloaded the risks relating to $2bn of loans to a group of hedge funds.
The FT report quoted extensively from the transaction’s investor presentation, which lifted the lid on closely guarded business secrets of the bank’s international wealth management franchise. One slide revealed that a third of the defaults on its yacht and aircraft loans in 2017 and 2018 were “related to US sanctions against Russian oligarchs”. Press reports at the time indicated that Oleg Deripaska and brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg had to terminate private jet leases with the bank in those years. The letters from Credit Suisse were sent during a week when the US, UK and the EU instigated a fresh wave of sanctions against Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a request like this,” said one investor who received the letter, noting that his firm had only ever received similar notices when it had been sent confidential documents accidentally.
via financial times: Credit Suisse asks investors to destroy documents linked to oligarch and tycoon yacht loans