Credit Suisse: Jobs for Deals and a Tuna Project That Hid the Money

In the Credit Suisse FCPA case over hiring favors, the bank agreed to pay $29,823,804 to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018. A separate 2021 action concerned Mozambique financing that concealed diverted money and government debt. For someone inside a bank, the revealing evidence runs through ordinary work: a recruiting decision made before the interview, a spreadsheet connecting a hire to a deal, a valuation that never reached investors.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s hiring order describes jobs used to influence foreign officials. The Mozambique action concerns misleading investors and failures in the bank’s books and controls. They are separate episodes, but in both the bank knew one thing and told the people checking its work another.

Credit Suisse’s Hiring-for-Business Scheme

In the criminal admissions supporting its non-prosecution agreement, Credit Suisse (Hong Kong) Limited admitted using jobs, internships and promotions to win banking business from officials who could direct it. Between 2007 and 2013, its senior managers hired, promoted and retained people referred by government officials and executives of state-owned clients. The Justice Department’s account of those admissions says the arrangement generated at least $46 million in profits from Chinese state-owned-enterprise mandates.

The bank was selling investment-banking services, including work on share offerings, bond offerings and acquisitions. A mandate meant the client had chosen the bank for that work. According to the order, the officials requesting jobs could influence those appointments or help the bank obtain regulatory approvals. Hiring bribery put a personal benefit inside that commercial decision.

The Securities and Exchange Commission found that Credit Suisse offered employment to more than 100 people connected to foreign officials in the Asia-Pacific region. That included more than 60 employees and interns referred by officials at more than 20 Chinese state-owned enterprises. Some received salaries, bonuses and housing allowances without compliance approval. The benefits continued after the offer letter: performance ratings and promotions could serve the same business relationship.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s order identifies Credit Suisse Group AG as the Swiss parent whose American depositary shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange. That U.S. securities listing brought the parent within the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act’s coverage. Its wholly owned Hong Kong subsidiary conducted much of the Asia-Pacific investment-banking business. The order also describes U.S. managers approving some referral hires and receiving complaints about their qualifications, placing the hiring decisions across the bank’s offices rather than inside one isolated recruiting team.

The Interview Came After the Decision

The Securities and Exchange Commission found that senior managers sometimes agreed to hire candidates before interviewing or vetting them, based on the business an official could deliver. Subordinates were then instructed to interview the candidates and score them highly regardless of performance. The recruiting process supplied the appearance of a merit decision after the business decision had already been made.

Credit Suisse had written restrictions on this practice. According to the order, those restrictions were not meaningfully enforced, and many hires bypassed legal and compliance review. Managers maintained spreadsheets connecting referral hires to clients and deals. An employee’s email, reproduced in the order, made the purpose plain:

The same paragraph records the employee’s conclusion that a relationship without that return was worthless to the organization. We see a recruiting program keeping score in banking revenue. The spreadsheet matters because it connects the job to the business the bank expected in exchange.

Promotions Followed the Relationship

The order describes a referral hire whose mother was a senior official at a Chinese state-owned energy enterprise. Bankers prepared her resume and pressed for an offer while pursuing a mandate connected to her mother’s enterprise. One senior banker cautioned colleagues, “not too many interviews,” explaining that she was unused to repeated interviews. Later, despite training and attendance problems, managers supported her employment and advancement.

The Securities and Exchange Commission also described a manager drafting an email for the hire to send back to him and other managers, making it appear that she had helped win a deal. He then circulated the returned message as evidence of her contribution. The absurdity is plain: the manager manufactured the very contribution his email appeared to recognize.

The consequences reached employees hired through the regular process. In another instance, the order says that managers decided to eliminate the positions of highly rated regular analysts to retain referral hires connected to expected banking mandates. In that account, the client relationship determined whose work the bank valued enough to keep.

JPMorgan provides a close parallel. Its Securities and Exchange Commission order described bankers tracking deals attributable to clients who had requested hires, using spreadsheets that matched referral hires against revenue. Across both banks’ orders, the hiring roster and the deal record belong in the same story.

The Mozambique Loans and Tuna Bonds

The Mozambique financing brought investor money into state-owned maritime projects, then concealed where some of that money went. In the criminal admissions accompanying its deferred prosecution agreement and its U.K. subsidiary’s guilty plea, Credit Suisse admitted defrauding U.S. and international investors in the financing of an $850 million loan for EMATUM, Mozambique’s state-owned tuna-fishing company. The Justice Department described the admitted conduct as running from 2013 through March 2017.

The Justice Department’s account of the former finance minister’s criminal trial describes state-owned borrowers financing coastal surveillance, tuna fishing and shipyards. Privinvest, a shipbuilder based in the United Arab Emirates, was to supply equipment and services. The government backed the loans, and the loans were sold in whole or in part to investors, including U.S. investors.

Those roles explain the banking and investment bribery problem. The state-owned companies were borrowers, the contractor supplied the projects, officials could authorize the government’s backing, and bankers arranged financing and sold the debt. Each decision created a different set of records: the documents securing government backing, the financing approval, the contractor payment and the investor disclosure.

Credit Suisse admitted that it represented the EMATUM proceeds would be used only for the tuna project. According to those criminal admissions, the contractor instead paid approximately $50 million in kickbacks to bankers at Credit Suisse Securities (Europe) Limited and approximately $150 million in bribes to Mozambican officials. The contractor received the loan proceeds from the bank before making those payments.

The false account extended to Mozambique’s ability to repay. Credit Suisse admitted misrepresentations and omissions about the existence and maturity dates of other debt, including a ProIndicus loan it had arranged and another bank’s loan that it knew about. Investors were buying debt with an incomplete picture of the country’s existing obligations. The financing used U.S. wires and the U.S. financial system, and the deception reached U.S. as well as international investors.

The Valuation Investors Never Saw

Credit Suisse knew that the EMATUM equipment was worth substantially less than the money raised, yet did not disclose that information during the restructuring and exchange. That admission is central to the Justice Department’s account of the corporate criminal resolution. It connects the bank’s knowledge to a fresh decision investors were being asked to make.

The bank had already identified significant corruption and bribery concerns about the contractor. By about 2015, it also knew that EMATUM was struggling to service the loan. Credit Suisse agreed to arrange an exchange into a bond with a later maturity date, while employees raised concerns about corruption allegations and disparities in the use of proceeds.

Credit Suisse then retained two independent industry experts to value the tuna boats and other goods. The experts identified a shortfall of between $265 million and $394 million between the funds raised and the fair-market value of the boats, infrastructure and training supplied. According to its admissions, the bank knew the results and did not disclose them to investors during the exchange.

This is more than an ignored warning. The bank commissioned specialist work to answer its own concerns, received an answer measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, and left that answer out of the investor account. For someone in credit, valuation or investor disclosures, the comparison is between what the review established and what the offering materials said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s separate account describes the exchange of earlier notes for sovereign bonds issued directly by Mozambique. It found that Credit Suisse’s offering materials failed to disclose the true debt position, the high default risk and the discovery that substantial proceeds had been diverted. When the extent of the hidden debt emerged, Mozambique defaulted on the financings.

Goldman Sachs shows a related failure in the 1MDB bond business. Its Securities and Exchange Commission order described bankers continuing to work with an intermediary whom compliance personnel had rejected, then falsely denying his involvement to an approval committee. The useful comparison is what the bank knew internally and what its approval process was told.

What the Different Proceedings Established

The hiring resolution concerned bribery through employment benefits. The Securities and Exchange Commission found anti-bribery and internal-accounting-control violations by Credit Suisse Group AG, while the Hong Kong subsidiary acknowledged criminal conduct through its non-prosecution agreement.

The Mozambique corporate criminal charge was conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Credit Suisse Group AG entered a deferred prosecution agreement, and Credit Suisse Securities (Europe) Limited pleaded guilty. The Securities and Exchange Commission separately found investor fraud and failures in the bank’s records and controls.

In August 2024, a federal jury convicted Mozambique’s former finance minister of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. The Justice Department reported that trial evidence showed he received $7 million in bribes for signing documents that committed the government to back the maritime loans. The public backing that helped secure the financing was itself part of the corrupt exchange proved at his trial.

What an Insider Can See

A person in recruiting may see the promised job; a person on a deal team may see the promised business. The Credit Suisse records show why those accounts become more useful together. We connect the decisions, payments and written records with the person who understands what they meant inside the bank:

• Recruiting and human resources. Referral requests, interview assessments, contract renewals, compensation decisions and messages tying a hire to a mandate.
• Deal origination and credit. Client pitches, financing approvals, government backing, existing debt and concerns about repayment.
• Valuation and investor disclosures. Reports on the assets purchased, internal questions about the proceeds and the offering materials investors received.
• Finance, compliance and audit. Transfers to the contractor, recipients of onward payments, accounting entries, escalation records and the response to known concerns.

The payment trail and the approval trail answer different questions. A transfer shows where money went, while a referral email or an internal valuation can explain why a business decision was corrupt or a disclosure misleading. Your knowledge of the transaction can connect records that sit in different departments and countries.

A March 2019 working paper available through MIT Sloan, Do Corporate Whistleblower Laws Deter Accounting Fraud?, studied firms exposed to state False Claims Acts through state pension-fund ownership. It found a 5% to 9% reduction in estimated accounting-fraud likelihood after that exposure. In a smaller sample, it found little evidence that increased investment in internal auditing explained the reduction. We see value in someone who can carry internal knowledge beyond the company’s own review.

The Civil Payments and Whistleblower Rewards

The hiring settlement required Credit Suisse to return $24,989,843 in profits to the Securities and Exchange Commission. We see a civil settlement that required the bank to return less in profits than the scheme admittedly earned it.

In the separate Mozambique action, Credit Suisse agreed to a $65 million civil penalty as part of a settlement of nearly $100 million with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The agency announced those obligations on October 19, 2021, for the investor deception and accounting failures.

For an eligible whistleblower, the SEC whistleblower program can pay 10% to 30% of collected monetary sanctions. For separate fraud involving government money, a whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers. We work with you on which program fits your information and how your knowledge of the bank’s decisions can support a case.

You Know What the Bank Knew

If you saw a job tied to a mandate or a financing disclosure stripped of what the bank already knew, speak with our whistleblower experts about the transaction. We build the case around your knowledge of those decisions and bring in FCPA whistleblower lawyers who understand bank approvals, cross-border payments and investor disclosures. You have a partner from the first conversation through the pursuit of a whistleblower award.