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By Elizabeth Olson
New York Times News Service Published October 12, 2001 GENEVA, SWITZERLAND -- A search of Swiss bank accounts dormant since World War II has recovered $10 million, an international tribunal announced Thursday.
It said the money has been awarded to families of Holocaust victims. The Zurich-based Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland was established as part of a comprehensive examination of bank accounts in response to allegations that Switzerland's financial institutions improperly held funds deposited by Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany. In four years of searching records, chairman H.M. Riemer said the tribunal had "struggled for truth and fairness in many difficult and sometimes tragic cases." In two cases, he said, the panel established that the accounts had funds that "were looted from victims of the Holocaust." But, more than half a century after the war ended, it was possible in most cases to establish facts "only to a fragmentary extent," he said. The tribunal's 17 arbitrators, appointed by Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve system, were slowed in tracking the account owners by the lack of information, particularly because wartime accounts were typically opened with just names and post office addresses. In some cases, it is widely believed, Swiss or other intermediaries opened accounts to disguise the origins of the money. The tribunal awarded claimants on 207 dormant accounts thought to have been opened by people who later died under the Nazis. The heirs received the $10 million, which included the money in the accounts plus interest and refunds of bank fees. Riemer said the tribunal's task had been "more complex than expected" because the claimants were from 70 countries and had contacted the tribunal in 15 languages. It processed 10,000 claims filed in response to two lists of more than 16,000 dormant accounts that the Swiss Bankers Association published in 1997. http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0110120063oct12.story?coll=chi%2Dnewsnationworld%2Dhed |