Quote by Tom Burgis

“BSI’s London office lay equidistant from the Bank of England and St Paul’s, bang in the centre of the City of London, the aorta of the global financial system. The unremarkable building stood on Cheapside, the City thoroughfare laid down by the Romans, where medieval merchants sold sheep’s feet and eels. The Stocks Market at its east end became known for the appalling stench of rotting fare. Around the corner was the Lord Mayor’s residence, the Mansion House. There Tony Blair had leavened a speech about unjust global trade with a reaffirmation that the City ‘creates much of the wealth on which this British nation depends’. From the start, the Swiss financiers who created Banco della Svizzera Italiana, or Swiss-Italian Bank, saw their task as helping money cross national borders. Construction of what was then the world’s longest tunnel, through the St Gotthard massif in the Alps, was under way. It would carry a railway to connect northern and southern Europe. When the work was completed, the Swiss president declared that ‘the world market is open’. The Italian-speaking Swiss city of Lugano lay on the new railway’s route. It was there that BSI’s founders opened a bank in 1873, to capitalise on the new trade route. They did well, expanding in Switzerland and sending bankers abroad. The bank came through one world war. In the second, BSI’s bankers did what many Swiss bankers did: they collaborated with the Nazis. At the same time, they did what they would start to do for their rich clients: they spun a story that reversed the truth. As Swiss bankers and their apologists told the tale, the reason that Switzerland made it a crime to violate bank secrecy was to help persecuted Jews protect their savings. In fact, the law was first drafted in 1932, the year before Hitler came to power. The impetus came not from altruism but self-interest. It was the Great Depression. Governments badly needed to collect taxes.”

Quote by Tom Burgis