Swiss SARs jump by 40 percent following Arab Spring fallout – The number of suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by Swiss banks and other financial institutions jumped by 40 percent last year, largely prompted by the fallout from the Arab Spring. The total sums included in the reports reached a record high of CHF3 billion, more than 2009 and 2010 put together, and represented the fifth successive increase in reporting in Switzerland. The Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland (MROS) received 1,625 SARs last year, two-thirds of which came from the banking sector. Ninety percent of these reports were forwarded to the police.

The MROS annual report said that it received 139 SARs in the wake of political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa and noted that these were “exceptional circumstances” that had not existed in 2010.

A number of these SARs reported suspicions of bribery and corruption. The majority of the Arab Spring SARs originated from Egypt where bribery was the biggest concern. SARs that originated from Tunisia involved suspected money laundering. Other reports were linked to Libya, Syria and the Ivory Coast.

Stefan Kunfermann, a spokesman for the Swiss Federal Office of Police, agreed that the increase was large, but told Thomson Reuters that he was unsurprised by the jump in reports as the agency had known that elements such as the Arab Spring would push reporting up. “We knew that there would be an increase. This year was [different],” he said.

The majority of SARs filed over the year involved suspicions of fraud as a predicate offence, although there were only 50 more reports in this category in 2011. “The high number of SARs in connection with fraud remains unrivalled,” the MROS said.

The Swiss said that the number of SARs which listed suspected bribery, embezzlement or membership of a criminal organisation as a predicate offence increased two-fold. Most of the cases involving suspected connections to a criminal organisation had concerned the Italian Mafia.

The MROS spokesman added that the increase in reporting had not led to much additional workload for the police or the need for extra staff to cope with the burden.

• “You don’t have the same work to do with every suspicious report. There were also a number of SARs connected with one big case,” he said.
• He declined to be drawn on whether the number of SARs would decrease to more normal levels next year. The average time spent processing a SAR in 2011 was two working days, the same as 2010.

The “big case” to which the spokesman referred involved the clean-up of accounts by one money transmitter and the subsequent retroactive reporting of numerous suspicious transactions.

This led to a four-fold increase in SARs from money transmitters. The number of SARs related to terrorist financing fell from 13 in 2010 to 10 in 2011, the report said.

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