You don’t become the bank of choice for Eastern European gangsters by posing too many.

You’d have thought that a bank with such a vast internal and international security apparatus as Credit Suisse—so attuned, however ineptly, to any hint of disloyalty towards the bank or its CEO’s arboreal riches, itself inflicting such great reputational damage to the bank—might, by way of compensation, also have noticed a thing or two, while watching fellow Suissers like awkward and wobbly hawks, that themselves might be against Credit Suisse’s reputational interests. Like, for instance, all of the money laundering one executive was allegedly doing for the Bulgarian mob. Or all of the kickbacks another banker was accepting from a Georgian oligarch and the hedge funds in which he was investing said oligarch’s money, from which he was also freely skimming from said oligarch’s accounts at Credit Suisse. But no:

The regulator, Finma, publicly censured Credit Suisse in 2018 for inadequately supervising and disciplining Mr. Lescaudron as a top earner, and said he had repeatedly broken internal rules, but it revealed little else about the bank’s actions in the matter….

However, the report, commissioned by Finma in 2016 and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, found Mr. Lescaudron’s activities triggered hundreds of alerts in the bank that weren’t fully probed in the 2009-15 period studied. In addition, around a dozen executives or managers in Credit Suisse’s private bank knew Mr. Lescaudron was repeatedly breaking rules but turned a blind eye, proposed lenient punishment for his misconduct or otherwise glossed over the issues because he brought in around $25 million in revenue a year, the report found….

The report found the irregularities were analyzed and escalated to a certain extent, but not enough. “None of the parties involved felt responsible for conclusively analyzing the already known as well as the resulting questions and drawing the necessary conclusions,” it said.

Credit Suisse Was Alerted to Private Banker’s Misconduct Years Before Criminal Charges [WSJ]