Rudolf Elmer, a Julius Bär private banker who led the bank’s Caribbean operations from 1994 to 2002, became a whistleblower after leaving the institution with copies of internal data. He alleged that Julius Bär’s Cayman Islands operation helped clients route funds through offshore structures to avoid taxes, including by representing work as performed in the Cayman Islands when it was actually conducted in Switzerland. Julius Bär denied wrongdoing and said its Cayman activities were legal. In 2005, Elmer was arrested in Zurich after selling a Swiss newspaper 169 megabytes of customer data and spent 30 days in custody.
In 2008, documents attributed to Elmer appeared on WikiLeaks; Der Spiegel described them as partly authentic and partly fabricated. On 17 January 2011, Elmer publicly handed Julian Assange two disks said to contain information on roughly 2,000 account holders, but later claimed in court that the disks were empty. Swiss courts convicted him in 2011 on multiple counts involving threats, attempted coercion, document forgery, and banking secrecy, while prosecutors also pursued alleged blackmail involving a US$50,000 demand. After years of litigation, Switzerland’s Federal Court ruled on 10 October 2018 that the core bank-secrecy charge could not stand and confirmed his acquittal on that issue, although it upheld penalties related to document forgery and threatening behavior and rejected his challenge to approximately CHF320,000 in case costs.
