Ex-Credit Suisse banker faces fresh investigation over forgery in Geneva

Bloomberg

Geneva prosecutors have opened a fresh investigation into alleged forgery by former Credit Suisse Group AG banker Patrice Lescaudron, seven weeks after his release from prison and just as appeals in the case got underway in Geneva.
Swiss prosecutors in the more than three-year-old case are looking into how Lescaudron allegedly faked dozens of bank statements for one of his Russian clients between 2009 and 2011, a period not covered in the initial 2017 indictment, according to a spokesman for the Geneva Prosecutor’s office. The probe was opened following a criminal complaint filed by the client’s lawyer, Giorgio Campa, on January 18, the spokesman said.
Prosecutors will now go back and dig into the weeds of the case which culminated last February in Lescaudron being sentenced to five years in prison for orchestrating a scheme to fake trades to recover burgeoning losses from his eastern European clients. The 55-year-old was freed in November after his lawyer argued two years of pretrial detention plus the toll of the scandal on his health was punishment enough.
Lescaudron, seated in the front row of the same courtroom where he faced his trial a year ago, listened as Campa opened the first day of hearings by articulating his criminal complaint to a trio of appeals court judges. “Credit Suisse should have found these files sooner,” he told the court. Lescaudron’s laptop where the faked statements were stored must be re-examined by an independent technology expert to find out how exactly he faked the documents and why they lay undiscovered for so long.
Credit Suisse has consistently said that Lescaudron was a lone wolf who hid his crimes from colleagues and superiors. Bank colleagues testified during his trial that they weren’t aware of any wrongdoing. A spokeswoman for the Zurich-based bank declined to comment on the new investigation. Campa and fellow Geneva lawyers representing separate clients including billionaire and former Georgian PM Bidzina Ivanishvili, Lescaudron’s biggest victim, have consistently argued that at very least the bank should be criminally liable for failing to detect Lescaudron’s fraud.
Lescaudron had admitted to investigators that he falsified returns on Excel statements he’d shared with clients to reassure them, and even admitted to bank investigators in 2015 that he would fake trades by cutting and pasting signatures from one paper to another.
But the faked account statements, said Campa — the Russian’s lawyer — went far beyond Lescaudron’s description and couldn’t have been done without the help of colleagues.