HSBC revelations shine light on secretive diamond world
As a compact, stable, and transferable store of value, diamonds offer enormous advantages to smugglers, money launderers, and tax evaders
A team of journalists from 45 countries has unearthed secret bank accounts maintained for criminals, traffickers, tax dodgers, politicians and celebrities.
In the spring of 2005, Erez Daleyot, a Belgian-Israeli diamond tycoon with some dubious connections, paid a visit to his Swiss bankers at HSBC Private Bank, where he would soon have up to $38.5 million in accounts tied to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands.
Business was good. With $886 million reported in revenue the previous year, Mr Daleyot informed his bankers that he projected topping that amount in the year ahead with $1 billion. He’d recently obtained a tax ruling from Israel allowing him to pay just 5 per cent in taxes on $85 million in earnings. Visiting Geneva to buy a $41.5 million private jet, he invited his bankers to the airport to show it off, according to secret HSBC files obtained by the French newspaper Le Monde and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists who are partners in the HSBC investiagation with The Irish Times.