Jan. 18: As a private Indian television channel on Tuesday claimed that some Indian-sounding names figure in the Swiss Bank secret accounts data which were handed over to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by a former Swiss banker, WikiLeaks said it is unlikely anytime soon to make public material provided to it this week by Swiss bank whistleblower Rudolf Elmer, according to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and sources close to Elmer.
Two Indian entities had purportedly parked about USD 95 million (about Rs 432 crore). Assange said, “It could be weeks or longer” before any of the material is released, adding he might hand over some of the material to Britain’s Serious Fraud Office.
Elmer, former chief of the Julius Baer Bank in the Cayman Islands, handed to Assange on Monday what he said were two discs containing information on about 2,000 offshore banking clients. Jack Blum, a former Congressional investigator said the account data outlined financial “structures, difficult to figure out.”
Elmer, fired by Julius Baer in 2002, goes on trial in Switzerland on Wednesday for breaching bank secrecy.