Massive Credit Suisse leak reportedly reveals possible criminal ties among 18,000 accounts

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Credit Suisse was scrambling Sunday to contain the fallout from its latest scandal after several newspapers reported that more than 18,000 leaked accounts showed that criminals, alleged human rights abusers and sanctioned individuals including dictators had been clients of the Swiss bank.

The leaked information, which covered accounts holding more than $100 billion, came from a whistle-blower who shared his findings with German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, according to a press release. The newspaper then involved an anti-corruption group and 46 other media outlets around the world, including The New York Times, Guardian, Le Monde and others.

Clients of the second-biggest Swiss bank included an international cast of unsavory characters, according to the media reports. Account holders included a Yemeni spy chief implicated in torture, Venezuelan officials involved in a corruption scandal, and the sons of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

The accounts had been opened from the 1940s into the 2010s, according to the Sunday release from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

«I've too often seen criminals and corrupt politicians who can afford to keep on doing business as usual, no matter what the circumstances, because they have the certainty that their ill-gotten gains will be kept safe,» Paul Radu, co-founder of the OCCRP, said in the statement. «Our investigation exposes how these people can bypass regulation despite their crimes, to the detriment of democracies and people all over the world.»

While Swiss banks, world-renowned for the country's strict secrecy laws protecting clients, aren't supposed to accept money linked to criminal activity, the law is mostly unenforced, according