“During the early post war years, a great deal of money from dormant accounts was initially transferred to so-called collective accounts. The same applied to individual safe-deposit boxes.
Then came the day when these assets disappeared into the bank’s “undisclosed reserves”.
A bank has three different balance sheets. The first is the published balance sheet accessible to shareholders. Discussed at the annual general meeting and released to the press, this is the bank’s public report and account. Then there is the balance sheet drawn up for the fiscal authorities. “Undisclosed reserves” are contingency funds set aside to cover losses and bad debts that might, if worst came to worst, endanger the bank’s survival. The third and only “true” balance sheet is known only to the board of directors – in the case of some large banks, to the chairman and his inner circle alone. It is plausible to assume that dormant Holocaust assets worth millions of francs were buried in Swiss bank’s undisclosed reserves immediately after the war.
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