Posted on 04/17/2003 5:13:07 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
BERN, Switzerland - Switzerland will end public access to archives documenting its links with apartheid-era South Africa for fear the material might fuel class-action lawsuits in the United States, the government said Thursday.
The archives were opened in May 2000 as part of a national research program to investigate Swiss relations with the South African government during the era of racial segregation.
The Swiss finance ministry said no other country offered comparable access, but it feared the records would put Swiss firms at a disadvantage in pending class-action lawsuits.
In November, U.S. lawyers sued 20 banks and major multinational companies in a New York court on behalf of apartheid victims.
Those named include Swiss banking giants UBS and Credit Suisse, who are accused of undermining a U.N. embargo between 1985 and 1993 by helping the white-dominated South African regime with loans and other business deals worth billions of dollars while foreign capital fled the country.
The class-action lawsuit seeks to follow a precedent established in litigation on behalf of Holocaust victims, who gained a $1.25 billion settlement from Swiss banks and corporations.
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