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Ex-Credit Suisse Bankers Fight Extradition Over Hidden Debt

Ex-Credit Suisse Bankers Fight Extradition Over $1 Billion Loans

(Bloomberg) -- Three former Credit Suisse Group AG bankers charged by the U.S. with helping to arrange more than $1.4 billion of hidden loans to Mozambique will fight extradition from the U.K.

Andrew Pearse and Surjan Singh, former managing directors, and Detelina Subeva, a vice president in the global financing unit, appeared in a London court Friday. District Judge Deborah Wright adjourned the hearing until March 29 for the former bankers to file their responses.

Ex-Credit Suisse Bankers Fight Extradition Over Hidden Debt

In December, the U.S. Department of Justice accused the bankers and other government officials of creating $2 billion in maritime projects as a front to enrich themselves. They diverted at least $200 million of the funding to pay bribes and kickbacks, according to an indictment.

While Credit Suisse has said it was deceived by its own staff and wasn’t named as a defendant in the U.S. indictment, it is facing a separate lawsuit brought by Mozambique’s government in London, according to a filing published last week.

Pearse, who headed Credit Suisse’s global financing group at the time, and Subeva both left in 2013 and started to work for an Abu Dhabi-based holding company named Privinvest Group. That year and the following year, Privinvest wired “bribe and kickback payments of more than $45 million” to a bank account Pearse had opened in Abu Dhabi, according to the U.S. indictment. Pearse shared some of those payments with Subeva.

Pearse, Singh and Subeva were released on bail in London until the next hearing.

--With assistance from Matthew Hill.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Browning in London at jbrowning9@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Christopher Elser

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