Christoph Meili (born april 12, 1968) is a Swiss whistleblower. Early 1997, Meili worked as a night guard at the Swiss bank Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft . He discovered that the bank destroyed Jewish credit balances, while it was required that those credit balances would be paid to the family members of Jews assassinated in the Holocaust. On January 9 1997, he took some bank files home. After a telephone consultation, he handed them over to a Jewish organisation, which brought the documents to the police.

The Swiss authorities reacted with an arrest warrant against Christoph Meili, because they claimed banking secrecy had been damaged (i.e., the rights of the deceased account holders had been violated). Following this accusation, he escaped to the United States, which granted him political asylum. Later the arrest warrant was withdrawn, but Meili preferred (until 2004) not to return to his homeland.

External link

• Declaration of Meili for a Senate Commission