Posted by Gwen Robinson on Jan 20 09:00.
No, WikiLeaks is not going to go away.
The saga over leaked documents on the whistleblowing website has heated up as bets are now being taken on which celebrities, business executives and prominent politicians will be revealed as tax evaders in the promised WikiLeaks data dump of more than 2,000 names from the files of Swiss private banker-turned whistleblower Rudolf Elmer.
Once again, the Swiss authorities are finding that their efforts to rein in Elmer are about as effective as their attempts to censure WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
As the FT reports on Thursday,
A Zurich court ruled on Wednesday that Rudolf Elmer, the Swiss self styled private banking “whistleblower”, was guilty of coercion and breaching bank secrecy, fining him SFr7,200 ($7,517).
Mr Elmer, a former employee of Bank Julius Baer, one of Switzerland’s leading private banks, this week made headlines after giving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange two CDs of what he claimed were details of secret bank accounts held by unspecified politicians and other international figures.
WikiLeaks said it would review the material, probably with the help of selected specialist news media, and release the material over coming weeks.
Elmer’s move has ignited speculation about the identities of those to be named in the data release.
Indeed, bmaker.ag, a betting website with one of the biggest sportsbooks, is, among other bookmakers, giving odds on a mind-boggling cast of characters it reckons might, or might not, be named in the Elmer files as operating off-shore accounts.
It might be some time before the names are released, Assange noted on Wednesday. But already, here’s a list of the full odds as they stood on Wednesday, according to Bookmaker*:
Nicholas Cage +400 20%
Oprah Winfrey +250 28%
President Obama +600 14%
Wesley Snipes +200 33%
Mike Tyson +800 11%
Scott Disick +500 16%
Donald Trump +350 22%
John Edwards +400 20%
Two or more of these celebrities +100 50%
* The +/- indicates the return on the wager. The percentage is the likelihood that response will occur. For example: betting on the candidate least likely to win would earn the most amount of money, should that happen.
The case against Elmer, who was fired as head of Baer’s Cayman Islands trust subsidiary in December 2002, followed threats he allegedly made to the bank and its employees, the FT adds.
Public prosecutors had sought an eight month unconditional jail sentence and a fine for coercion and breaching bank secrecy. The guilty verdict included a charge that Elmer had made a bomb threat against a member of the bank’s staff.
Elmer said earlier in January that he would admit certain counts of coercion, but insisted he hadn’t broken Swiss banking secrecy laws because the files came from a Julius Baer subsidiary in the Cayman Islands, which wasn’t subject to Swiss banking secrecy.
Whatever his transgressions, it’s clear that Elmer played a crucial role in the evolution of the WikiLeaks saga from early days back in 2008 – and is set to take it to a whole new level.
As Business Insider remarks, “It’s incredible to think that when the New York Times covered the case initially, t didn’t even mention the Wikileaks aspect”.
Then again, even Elmer sounded a little dazed by the publicity he’d generated when he noted, via Twitter: “I started pulling on the tail of a mouse and it became a fire-breathing dragon”.
That might well sum up the entire saga of WikiLeaks.
