Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? by Charles Raw, Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson Page B

have been able to implement that promise without the intervention of Charles de Gaulle. Any American organization as brash as Bernie's was an automatic victim of the change of mood after his return to power in May 1958. Almost inevitably, the infant IOS did things which were sinful in the eyes of Gaullist officials. American mutual funds were a new and puzzling phenomenon: the French authorities entertained dark suspicions that IOS was selling fund shares to French citizens, and they suddenly raided the mail at one of the
    post offices IOS was using.
        Although they found no evidence, this was a lethal attack, because a mutual fund must have reliable postal communication with its clients. The French said that their regulations made it illegal to send negotiable instruments through the post. Cornfeld claimed this was irrelevant, because IOS was not selling to French citizens. The French bureaucracy deployed its full capacity for non-cooperation. They agreed to give clearance for one post office to pass IOS mail, but they refused to say they would not raid IOS mail at other offices.
        It was very clear that the time had come to move on, and a police visit to Boulevard Flandrin drove home the message. Casting around for an alternative haven, Cornfeld hit upon the idea of Geneva.
        It appears to have been a casual decision, based on little more than the fact that it was a city outside French regulation where they spoke French, a language in which Cornfeld was now reasonably fluent. Chuck Kleinmann, an ex-mate in the us merchant marine, went ahead to set things up, and he acquired a pleasant apartment at the top of 119 Rue de Lausanne, with a splendid view across the trees of a small park to the lake, and beyond it the long limestone ridge of the Saleve. About one day in five, the occupants of the apartment could see the shining triangle of Mont Blanc, fifty miles away on the frontier between France and Italy. The apartment became Bernie's headquarters when, in the autumn of 1958, he shifted the base of his growing sales force from Paris to Geneva. The hq all fitted into the one apartment; it consisted of Cornfeld, Kleinman, Bert Cantor and two secretaries.
        By 1958, Calvin's and Voltaire's city of refuge had turned into the last best hope for the world's unloved rich and their money. Ever since the Reformation, Geneva, a Protestant island hemmed by Catholic seas, had maintained a tradition of sanctuary. In the 1930s and 1940s Geneva, like Switzerland as a whole, helped to save many thousands of people from the Nazis and the Fascists. But after 1945, the new refugees tended more and more to come from outside Europe: from the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America. Not all of them were innocent victims of persecution.
        For all those who went to Geneva in person, thousands more sent their money. It had always been possible to rely upon the personal integrity of bankers in the original homeland of the Protestant ethic and the individual - but strictly individual - conscience. And by the time that Bernie arrived, the advantages of Swiss bank accounts were being discovered by spies, gamblers and dictators, and by Middle Western dentists, New York stockbrokers and other honest folk with no love for the taxman. Money, the chairman of the Credit Suisse has noted, 'tends to flow to those places where its owner believes it finds maximum security'. Like all good Swiss bankers, he maintains that most people who send their money to Switzerland have paid their tax first, but it is a proposition which cannot be put to the test, because of Swiss bank secrecy.
        In most countries, banks are expected to protect the secrecy of their clients' affairs, and may be sued in the civil courts for damages if they fail to do so. The first remarkable thing about Switzerland is that the additional sanction of the criminal law is invoked to reinforce the civil obligation to secrecy. Article 47(b) of the Banking Act,