The rich and famous on Wikileaks

After Cablegate, the following hunt for Julian Assange and the unsuccessful attempts to shut down Wikileaks in general, it seems like the Swedish whistle-blower and his team are back to work. Last week Julian Assange presented in a news conference at the Frontline Club in London the handover of two compact discs with confidential tax details of 2,000 wealthy and prominent individuals. The provider was the former Swiss banker Julius Elmer, who claimed that the data will reveal cases of money-laundering and illegal tax-evasion. According to Assange, Wikileaks plans to publish the documents within a few weeks, after the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) had a closer look on them (click here for more information).

Elmer is not an unknown quantity. The former COO of the Cayman Islands tax haven branch of Juliua Bär delivered confidential documents to Wikileaks in 2007 and to The Guardian in 2009 (click here for more details). Elmer, who was recently found guilty of coercion by a Zürich court, is a contreversioal figure and it will be interesting to see if he really provided what he claimed to. There are several pecularities which reduce his credibility:

The documents he gave to Wikileaks in 2007 consisted also falsified material, such as a letter of the bank to Angela Merkel. Furthermore, he sent spoof letters to the American tax authorities in which he claimed to be a penitent taxpayer confessing his evasion. The bank itself suspects him to be on his personal vendetta against Julius Bär because they sacked him in 2002.

The statement of the bank:

"The aim of [Elmer's] activities was, and is, to discredit Julius Baer as well as clients in the eyes of the public. With this goal in mind, Mr Elmer spread baseless accusations and passed on unlawfully acquired, respectively retained, documents to the media, and later also to WikiLeaks. To back up his campaign, he also used falsified documents."

It is an interesting detail that Assange presented Elmer and his compact discs in a special news conference. Without knowing what Elmer is going to deliver for Wikileaks he staged the transfer as it is the next big thing. One can only speculate about the reasons for this unusual step. Does he want to show the US and his prosecutors that Wikileaks is still alive and invincible? Or does he simply likes to be in front of TV cameras? What ever the reason is, it could harm the credibility of Wikileaks if Elmer fails to deliver.

Written by Leaker3