The files at the foundation of the Swiss Leaks articles are based on data secreted away by Hervé Falciani, a former HSBC employee-turned-whistleblower. He turned the data over to the French government in 2008 and its tax authority launched an investigation. The French newspaper Le Monde obtained a version of the data, which covers accounts of more than 100,000 clients (individuals and legal entities) from more than 200 countries. The newspaper shared it with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) with the agreement that it would assemble a global team of journalists, one of them being the Egyptian Hesham Allam of Al-Watan newspaper, to explore the data and produce this reporting project. The data comes from three types of internal bank files, all from different time periods. One reflects clients and their associated private accounts at the Swiss branch of the bank mostly from 1988 to 2007. Another is a snapshot of the maximum amounts in the client accounts during 2006 and 2007. The third is of notes on clients and conversations with them made by bank employees during 2005. Egypt is ranked 20th among the countries with the…
