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Edited by: Fern Sidman
In 2015, Iqbal Khan was the embodiment of a modern finance success story. A 34-year-old prodigy who had moved from Pakistan to Switzerland as a teenager, Khan rose at an astonishing pace through the ranks of Credit Suisse to become head of international wealth management. As The New York Post detailed in its coverage of Duncan Mavin’s explosive new book Meltdown: Greed, Scandal, and the Collapse of Credit Suisse (Pegasus Books), even Khan himself was taken aback by the speed of his ascent. But what began as a story of triumph would soon unravel into one of the most bizarre and disturbing scandals in the history of global banking.
According to the report in The New York Post, Khan—once seen internally as the “crown prince” of Credit Suisse and a likely successor to the CEO—found himself at the center of a corporate espionage debacle that would come to be known simply as “Spygate.” The scandal was not just a breach of trust but a surreal descent into corporate paranoia, pettiness, and power plays at the highest levels of the bank.
Not long after reaching his career peak, Khan discovered that he was being followed—literally. Private detectives, hired at the behest of Credit Suisse executives, had been tailing him for weeks. As The New York Post report cites from Mavin’s book, the surveillance operation was invasive and relentless: the investigators tracked Khan during his morning jogs, staked out his family home, and even observed his children. Their objective? To gather photographic and documentary evidence of anyone Khan might be meeting with—especially former colleagues—amid fears that he might be luring top talent away to a rival bank.
While Credit Suisse’s then-CEO Tidjane Thiam never publicly acknowledged the scheme, he privately criticized the operation—calling the hired spies “amateurish,” according to Mavin’s revelations. But the intrigue took a darker turn just weeks after the scandal broke: the external consultant who had arranged the entire surveillance program died by suicide under mysterious circumstances. The affair morphed from a corporate embarrassment into a haunting cautionary tale about the internal rot festering within one of the world’s most storied financial institutions.
And yet, as The New York Post report indicated, this episode did not mark the end of Credit Suisse’s troubles. In many ways, Spygate was just a symptom of a deeper institutional sickness. The bank, founded in 1856 and once considered too deeply enmeshed in the global economy to ever truly falter, had a long history of reckless behavior. According to Mavin’s account, Credit Suisse didn’t merely experience occasional scandals—it cultivated them.
From money laundering and tax evasion to enabling corrupt regimes and facilitating dubious financial products, the bank’s track record reads like a case study in systemic dysfunction. As The New York Post report emphasized, while other financial institutions managed periods of stability and reform, Credit Suisse consistently “courted trouble.” The Spygate scandal was simply the most theatrical manifestation of a culture driven by ego, secrecy, and self-interest.
Further investigations of Mavin’s work, uncovered an even broader pattern of surveillance. Beyond Khan, at least six other individuals—including former employees and even the ex-partner of the CEO’s girlfriend—had been tailed by private detectives. The extent of the covert operations stunned regulators, though much of it was difficult to prosecute. Credit Suisse executives had been careful to leave no formal paper trail, communicating via personal WhatsApp messages and text chains that were out of the reach of oversight bodies. In one particularly damning example, The New York Post notes, an invoice was deliberately falsified to conceal spy-related expenses.
The collapse of Credit Suisse, one of the world’s most iconic financial institutions, was not the result of a sudden shock or market miscalculation—it was the culmination of a century-long culture steeped in secrecy, moral compromise, and institutional arrogance. The fall of the Swiss banking giant was years in the making—and in many ways, tragically inevitable.
Credit Suisse, founded in 1856, long prided itself on discretion, a characteristic deeply rooted in the Swiss tradition of neutrality. But as The New York Post reported, that discretion morphed over time into a form of financial opacity that shielded not only ordinary account holders, but also dictators, kleptocrats, and war criminals. According to Mavin’s revelations cited by The New York Post, Switzerland’s banks became global sanctuaries for dirty money during and after both World Wars—far beyond mere neutrality, they became complicit in cleansing blood-stained fortunes.
Among the most disturbing revelations is the bank’s historical role in laundering Nazi wealth. Credit Suisse actively facilitated the financial needs of fascist regimes, including Romanian Nazi official Radu Lecca and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, according to the information provided in The New York Post report. In New York, one Credit Suisse branch allegedly helped German clients mask the true ownership of their assets, shielding them from detection. Mavin’s book exposes the extent to which the bank willingly served as a conduit for looted gold and stolen Jewish property, helping to remove the “Nazi taint” from these assets in exchange for discretion and profit.
The bank’s cold indifference to justice is perhaps best exemplified in the heartbreaking case of Estelle Sapir, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor. As The New York Post report recounted from Mavin’s narrative, Sapir tried for decades to claim funds her father had deposited at a Credit Suisse branch in Geneva before being murdered in a concentration camp. The bank, in an act of grotesque bureaucratic cruelty, demanded she provide a death certificate. “Estelle demanded of the bank clerk whom she should ask for a death certificate: Hitler, Himmler or Eichmann?” writes Mavin. The bank ultimately paid Sapir $500,000—but only in 1998, decades after her ordeal. Even then, a bank spokesperson offered a lukewarm apology while still hiding behind Swiss secrecy laws, refusing to confirm or deny the facts of the case, according to The New York Post.
But Credit Suisse’s culture of secrecy extended beyond its dealings with the outside world. Even its own executives were not immune from its cutthroat internal politics. John Mack—nicknamed “Mack the Knife” for his aggressive cost-cutting—was brought in as co-CEO in 2001 and returned the bank to profitability. But in a surreal twist, he was fired in 2004 after discovering he had been operating from a decoy office the bank had set up across the street, while the real headquarters was being renovated behind his back. Mavin describes this bizarre move as emblematic of the paranoia and internal sabotage that defined Credit Suisse’s upper echelons.
More recently, the scandals accelerated at a breakneck pace. In 2022, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) leaked internal records from 18,000 Credit Suisse accounts in a damning exposé known as the Suisse Secrets. As reported by The New York Post, the leaks revealed that Credit Suisse had quietly serviced clients involved in heinous activities—from an Egyptian intelligence family linked to CIA torture operations, to an Italian criminal money launderer, to a German telecom executive who bribed Nigerian officials.
In June 2023, the curtain finally closed on one of the most scandal-ridden institutions in modern banking history. Credit Suisse was acquired in a $3.2 billion all-stock emergency rescue by rival UBS Group AG. The deal, orchestrated by Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), marked the end of a 167-year legacy—a legacy marred not by market misfortune alone, but by a relentless pattern of secrecy, corruption, and recklessness. As The New York Post extensively documented, the downfall of Credit Suisse was neither sudden nor surprising. It was a slow-motion implosion, decades in the making.
Among the most damning revelations was the April 2023 discovery that the bank had continued to maintain accounts for hundreds of Nazi officials—some of whom had been convicted at the Nuremberg trials—well into the modern era, as was revealed in The New York Post report. That such accounts remained open for decades after the atrocities of World War II shines a proverbial spotlight on the bank’s deeply rooted culture of moral indifference and obsession with secrecy, regardless of the cost to its reputation or ethics.
But the rot ran far deeper than historical stain. The New York Post report highlighted a staggering pattern of mismanagement, one that ultimately left Credit Suisse exposed to catastrophe. Since 2010 alone, the bank paid more than $15 billion in fines and settlements linked to misconduct by its own employees. From money laundering scandals to corporate espionage, from shady dealings with dictators to covert surveillance programs, Credit Suisse accumulated a rap sheet that would have destroyed any smaller institution long ago.
FINMA concluded that Credit Suisse’s internal structure and culture were deeply flawed. One of the most glaring problems? Compensation. The bank’s bonus structure—lavish and largely untethered to performance—fueled a system where risk was rewarded and prudence was punished, The New York Post report explained. Even in years when the bank hemorrhaged credibility and finances, employees still pocketed enormous payouts. This, according to Mavin’s analysis as reported by The New York Post, eroded any incentive to correct course. When failure is lucrative, accountability becomes irrelevant.
Yet perhaps the most strategic misstep—the fatal overreach—was Credit Suisse’s ambition to remake itself as a global investment powerhouse. In Mavin’s view, quoted by The New York Post, the bank became “a monster,” a high-octane investment vehicle lashed onto a relatively small and tradition-bound Swiss banking core. The bank’s aggressive international expansion, paired with its inability to control the reputational risks that followed, ultimately created an institution too complex, too arrogant, and too brittle to withstand global financial pressures.
Unlike many of its competitors, Credit Suisse never fully reconciled its ambition with its risk exposure. It pursued global scale without building the compliance architecture to support it. It courted high-risk clients without assessing long-term reputational costs. It operated as if its status as a Swiss institution—the very emblem of discretion and prestige—could insulate it from public scrutiny. That illusion could not last forever.
The UBS takeover may have prevented a broader financial crisis, but it could not preserve the Credit Suisse name. What was once a symbol of Swiss banking excellence is now remembered as a cautionary tale of greed, hubris, and institutional decay. Credit Suisse’s demise was not just a business failure—it was the inevitable reckoning for a bank that lost its moral compass long ago.
History will record the numbers—the billions lost, the scandals paid for, the rescue engineered by regulators. But the deeper lesson, as powerfully illustrated through The New York Post’s coverage of Meltdown, is this: no institution, however old or globally entrenched, can survive when secrecy eclipses ethics, and when ambition is unmoored from accountability.
