Ex-UBS Worker Skips His Swiss Appeal of Spying Conviction

(Bloomberg) -- Call it the Falciani Principle. A former UBS Group AG employee who’s appealing his conviction for commercial espionage and money laundering skipped his Swiss court appearance on Monday morning, as expected, to avoid likely arrest.

The man, only identified as Rene S., was convicted in absentia last year and sentenced to 40 months in prison after fleeing to Germany. That’s similar to Herve Falciani, the former HSBC Holdings Plc’s employee who escaped to France and was found guilty in 2015 of stealing client data.

While Switzerland tried unsuccessfully to extradite Falciani, the Swiss judge who convicted Rene S. last year said he would be unlikely to face extradition from Germany. She didn’t expect Rene S. to show up and booked an extra day to give him time to change his mind. He didn’t and skipped both trial dates.

Rene S. was a no-show again on Monday at a hearing that lasted barely five minutes, his lawyer Moritz Gall said by email. A second hearing has been scheduled for Aug. 10. Rene S. is appealing the convictions because there was a lack of hard evidence and has always asserted his innocence, said Gall.

The appeal is a reminder of the challenge Switzerland faces abroad in trying to enforce its bank-secrecy rules, a key pillar of Swiss banking’s reputation for discretion.

Rene S., like Falciani, was acquitted of breaking the secrecy laws because his crime was mostly committed abroad, in his case in Germany where Swiss law has no jurisdiction. A former Julius Baer banker was cleared just months earlier by the Swiss Supreme Court of similar charges because he ran a Cayman Islands unit of the bank where secrecy law didn’t apply.

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Falciani, a former IT specialist at HSBC, was convicted of commercial espionage in part because of evidence he tried to sell the bank customer data he took. The Italian-French citizen later shared the data with French tax authorities because he said he wanted to demonstrate HSBC clients were tax evaders.

Rene S. went on trial accused of stealing details on more than 200 clients -- including more than 30 family foundations -- that he was found guilty of having sold to German officials, pocketing 1.15 million euros ($1.3 million). Rene S. denied ever being the person who took the data, and his lawyer argued that the bank had failed to explore indications pointing to other possible perpetrators.

He is also appealing the conviction for money-laundering, over the funds he was judged to have used to buy and sell an apartment on the Spanish island of Mallorca.

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