Hervé_Falciani
Hervé Daniel Marcel Falciani (Italian: [falˈtʃaːni]; born 9 January 1972) is a French-Italian systems engineer and whistleblower who is credited with "the biggest banking leak in history." In 2008, Falciani began collaborating with numerous European nations by providing allegedly illegal stolen information relating to more than 130,000 suspected tax evaders with Swiss bank accounts – specifically those with accounts in HSBC's Swiss subsidiary HSBC Private Bank.Falciani is the person behind the "Lagarde list", so called as it is a list of HSBC clients who allegedly used the bank to evade taxes and launder money that Falciani leaked to ex–French Minister of Finance Christine Lagarde, currently the President of the European Central Bank. Lagarde, in turn, sent the list to governments whose citizens were on the list.On 11 December 2014, Falciani was indicted in absentia by the Swiss federal government for violating the country's bank secrecy laws and for industrial espionage. The indictment accused Falciani of stealing information from HSBC's Geneva offices and passing it on to tax authorities in France. HSBC had been indicted in France for money laundering in November 2014. In November 2015, Switzerland’s federal court sentenced Falciani to five years in prison – the "longest sentence ever demanded by the confederation's public ministry in a case of banking data theft". Falciani was accused of "aggravated financial espionage, data theft and violation of commercial and banking secrecy".
