Bern : Switzerland’s high court has upheld the acquittal of a former bank accountant who handed over confidential client information to WikiLeaks, ruling Wednesday he wasn’t bound by the country’s strict banking secrecy laws at the time.
The Federal Tribunal validated a ruling by Zurich’s regional supreme court in the case of Rudolf Elmer, a former top accountant at a Cayman Islands affiliate of Swiss bank Julius Baer who was fired in 2002.
The tribunal agreed that because Elmer had been an employee of the affiliate, he wasn’t bound by Swiss banking secrecy laws when he gave the information to WikiLeaks in 2008. That year, a U.S. judge shut WikiLeaks down for two weeks after a complaint filed by Julius Baer about Elmer.
