Switzerland has published the names of owners of unclaimed accounts
This operation was announced back in May, when the SBA said that by the end of the year a website would begin operating with information about the owners of so-called 'abandoned' deposits (comptes en déshérence). This innovation is linked to legislative amendments that came into force at the beginning of the year, defining the procedure for closing accounts of clients with whom Swiss banks have lost contact for at least 60 years.
According to the new rules, information about assets worth more than 500 francs whose owners have lost contact is published on a special website after 60 years. If within a certain period (one year or five years for accounts 'older' than 1954) clients or their legal representatives do not make themselves known, the assets will be transferred to the Confederation and lost forever to the owners.
To date, the SBA list contains the names of holders of 2,600 accounts totaling about 44 million francs and about 80 safe-deposit boxes with unknown contents. "The publication is the banks' last attempt to contact their clients. It gives owners and their legal representatives the opportunity to assert their rights to the 'abandoned' accounts before they finally pass to the Confederation," stressed SBA head Claude-Alain Margelisch. Recall that previously the famous Swiss banking secrecy prevented financial institutions from using such an effective method to search for vanished clients.
The website dedicated to dormant accounts will be updated regularly as the 60-year period allowed for banks to independently search for clients expires, according to an official SBA press release. The dormantaccounts.ch platform publishes the following data (if known): the client's first and last name, date of birth and citizenship, as well as the last place of residence or location of the legal entity known to the bank. In exceptional cases, the account number or passbook number is indicated if the available information is insufficient to identify the owner.
According to our observations, the list includes representatives of different countries, and sometimes these are apparently members of the same family. We managed to find in it a client of one of the Swiss banks named Tatyana Arkhangelskaya, born in 1937, living in the USA, a Russian woman Liliana Berestovskaya from France, several people with the surname Aznavuryan with 'citizenship' listed as Armenia, Józef Biliński who lived in still Polish Lviv, and also a Swiss woman Marie Bittchen-Carlin from Russia.
Alas, the death of the account holder is one of the most common reasons why assets remain unclaimed, so we write about these people in the past tense (dates of birth are not always given). But perhaps their relatives will be able to claim inheritance rights.
If you find your own surname in the list of unclaimed deposits, you should fill out a form which will be automatically forwarded to the relevant bank, the SBA reports. In addition, claimants to 'forgotten' Swiss accounts will need to provide evidence that they are entitled to these assets.
The Swiss Bankers Association also reminds that you can search for your funds in the Confederation's banks without waiting for the 60-year period stipulated by the new rules to expire. To do this, simply contact the Banking Ombudsman service, to whom banks pass information about 'dormant' accounts after 10 years from the loss of contact with the asset owners.
Recall that the problem of identifying unclaimed deposits is not new for Switzerland: the small Alpine country has made significant efforts to find the owners (or their heirs) of accounts in Swiss banks whose traces were lost in the turmoil of World War II. In 1998, Jewish organizations, lawyers for victims of Nazism, and representatives of the largest Swiss banks Union Bank of Switzerland and Credit Suisse reached a so-called 'global agreement' under which the Confederation's financial institutions paid $1.25 billion in compensation.
It should be noted that the new requirements regarding the publication of information about owners of unclaimed accounts are not related to the investigation of wartime events. Whether names of NSDAP members or Holocaust victims will be found in the flow of published data remains to be seen.