A Swiss Federal Criminal Court has sentenced a former employee of Julius Baer Group to three years in prison for data theft after handing client information to German tax authorities.
The Court said it had confirmed a settlement between 54-year-old IT specialist Lutz Otte and the public prosecutor, in which he agreed to plead guilty in return for the three-year sentence, half of which was suspended.
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Otte had been charged with breaching banking laws, industrial espionage and money laundering.
Otte was accused of collecting data on wealthy German and Dutch clients from various Julius Baer systems between October and December 2011.
Otte has also sent 15 emails from his work computer to his private account with attachments containing client names, addresses, account numbers, account balances and currencies, according to the arraignment.
He had then compiled a list of German clients with assets of more than 100,000, Swiss francs, British pounds or dollars, and passed it on to a retired German tax inspector.
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By GlobalDataThere, he handed over data on 2,700 German clients to be transferred to the German tax authorities and agreed on payment of 1.1 million.
Prosecutors said they only recovered 140,000 euros from the man’s accounts. His assets have been seized to guarantee a so-called compensatory claim by the Swiss authorities worth 740,000.
The man told the court in Bellinzona that he had planned to use the bulk of the money to pay off taxes he owed in Germany.
