Credit Suisse settles spying case with former executive banker
Credit Suisse has reached an out-of-court settlement with its former star banker Iqbal Khan whose explosive allegations of corporate espionage led to the resignation of chief executive Tidjane Thiam, the Swiss bank said on Sunday.
“All involved parties have agreed to settle,” said Credit Suisse, according to the Financial Times. “This matter is now closed.”
The bank confirmed it had also reached a settlement with the private detective firm Investigo.
Khan, now the co-president of global wealth management at UBS, has not commented on the news, which was first reported in the Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag.
His claims, which were initiated in September 2019, were sparked when the banker resigned from Credit Suisse to take up his current role at UBS.
Fearing that Khan would lure staff and clients to the rival bank, his former employer hired Investigo to monitor him and identify anyone he met with.
Khan claimed that a group of three men chased him and his wife through streets in Zurich by both car and on foot. The incident led to a physical confrontation behind the Swiss National Bank.
Credit Suisse subsequently admitted to hiring private investigators to track another former executive, Peter Goerke, and that both cases of surveillance had been ordered by its former chief operations officer Pierre-Olivier Bouée.
In February last year the former chief executive officer of Credit Suisse Tidjane Thiam resigned under pressure and a private investigator, who organised the surveillance, committed suicide after the scandal came to light.
The settlement reached between Khan and Credit Suisse will see the banker’s complaints, against the bank and the private detectives, withdrawn according to NZZ am Sonntag.
“The investigations associated with the criminal charges will be discontinued,” Erich Wenzinger, a spokesman for the chief public prosecutor’s office in the canton of Zurich, said.
Meanwhile enforcement proceedings by Swiss financial markets FINMA into Credit Suisse’s actions, which started last September, were still ongoing, a spokesman said.