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Bank Julius Baer vs. Wikileaks
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JULIAN ASSANGE and DANIEL SCHMITT
2008-01-23

The largest Swiss bank specializing in hiding the assets of the ultra-
rich, Bank Julius Baer, says it will file federal US proceedings
against the transparency group Wikileaks by Friday.

Over the last two weeks, Wikileaks has released several hundred
documents from a Swiss banking whistleblower purportedly showing
offshore tax evasion and money laundering by extremely wealthy and in
some cases, politically sensitive, clients from the US, Europe, China
and Peru.

Part of the data was leaked to US and German tax authorities in 2005
and the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the act of leaking but
not those mentioned in the material. The detail and specific
allegations have previously been unavailable to the public.

The bank concerned, Julius Baer (BJB), which specializes in asset
hiding, has briefed Hollywood media lawyers Lavely and Singer, who
like to describe themselves as "all-around bad cop for stars from
Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Jim Carrey and Celine
Dion.".

Strangely, Lavely and Singer have refused to put in writing either the
name of their client or name of the documents concerned.

However in a telephone call yesterday between Wikileaks' Californian
counsel Julie Turner [editor: Julie Turner was Wikileaks pre-
litigation lawyer for this matter. Don't send her material for
Wikileaks in general] and Lavely and Singer's Evan Spiegel, L&S
admitted their client was BJB and claimed that the whistleblower
concerned was the former deputy director of the Cayman Islands office,
Rudolf Elmer.

Mr. Elmer, who has since returned to Zurich, took a December 2007 anti-
stalking case against BJB in an attempt to prevent BJB's private
detectives following him. L&S claims that it has its own proceedings
against the whistleblower scheduled for hearing this month. L&S made
several other allegations against Mr. Elmer to Wikileaks' counsel,
however L&S have not put these in writing.

The Swiss daily, Weltwoche, in its 2005 article, "The Leak in
Paradise", confirmed the veracity of several of the files with two BJB
Cayman Islands office employees.

Although Wikileaks can not say that the files are identical to those
seen by the Swiss paper, in light of BJB's threatened legal attack on
Wikileaks over documents that:

..constitute violation of trade secrets, conversion and stolen
documents by former employee in violation of a written confidentiality
agreement and copyright infringement, among other wrongful and
tortuous conduct.

Wikileaks asks that the documents and BJB's practices of asset hiding
be inspected and reminds BJB that its failure to openly respond to the
allegations against it continues to draw scrutiny of the public and
regulators (to whom the material has been forwarded) alike.