ABSTRACT
The violation Cossandey was to investigate was the shredding of holocaust-era documents by the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), discovered at its Zurich branch on the night of January 8, 1997 by an unassuming bank guard named Christoph Meili. According to UBS, the material that had already been shredded, filled three large packing crates, each roughly three feet square and two feet deep, as well as two plastic garbage bags four to five feet high. UBS claimed that the bank’s archivist and a UBS Vice President, Erwin Hagenmuller, was unaware of the ban on Holocaust-era documents’ destruction because, in their words, his superiors failed to inform him. While the Swiss parliament took the necessary moves to absolve any future Christoph Meilis, the Zurich prosecutor, Peter Cossandey, made official what Borer had told D’Amato three weeks before, but with a twist. The connection between the banks and the Swiss government was too much to overcome.
