Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. et al v. Wikileaks et al was a lawsuit filed by Bank Julius Baer against the website WikiLeaks.
In early February 2008, a California judge forced Dynadot, the domain registrar of wikileaks.org, to disassociate the site's domain name records with its servers, preventing use of the domain name to reach the site. Initially, the bank only wanted the documents to be removed (WikiLeaks had failed to name a contact person).
The judge's actions roused media and cyber-liberties groups to defend WikiLeaks' rights under the First Amendment and brought renewed scrutiny to the documents the bank hoped to shield.
The judge lifted the injunction and the bank dropped the case on 5 March 2008.
In 2002, the bank learned that records pertaining to the arrangement of anonymizing trusts in the Cayman Islands for clients from 1997 to 2002 had been leaked. They interviewed the local employees with a polygraph as per company policy. The bank was unsatisfied with the answers of Cayman unit COO Rudolf Elmer, and terminated his employment. In June 2005, the leak was reported by the Swiss financial weekly Cash and the Wall Street Journal, though details of individual accounts were not reported on. In December 2007, Elmer released documents related to WikiLeaks regarding surveillance of him and his family. The next month, some of the leaked account data began appearing on WikiLeaks. Contributors to WikiLeaks allege that these provide evidence of asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion. Ten account holders in the United States, Spain, Peru, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, and Switzerland have been identified so far on WikiLeaks.[citation needed]
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Julius Bär Group Ltd. (or Julius Baer Group, SIX: BAER) is the leading Swiss private banking group which is the parent company of Bank Julius Baer, a traditional private bank based in Zurich, Switzerland. The firm dates itself back to the year 1890, when an exchange office was founded by Ludwig Hirschhorn und Theodor Grob. Joseph Michael Uhl and Julius Bär joined in 1896, when Theodor Grob left. And it was in 1901, when Julius Bär acquired the bank. The group manages substantial assets for private clients from all over the world. The firm's services consist mainly of wealth management and investment consultancy, provides products via its open architecture platform as well as securities and foreign exchange trading.
Julius Baer employs a staff of over 3 600 in more than 20 countries and over 40 locations, including Zurich (head office), Dubai, Frankfurt, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Lugano, Milan, Monaco, Montevideo, Moscow and Singapore.
In September 2005, Julius Bär acquired the independent private banks Ferrier Lullin, Ehinger & Armand von Ernst, Banco di Lugano, and the asset management house Global Asset Management (GAM) from the Swiss banking giant UBS AG, to become one of the largest independent wealth management firms in Switzerland. UBS acquired almost 21% of Baer's shares as part of the deal, but sold off its stake in May 2007 to fund a share buyback. GAM was demerged as a separate company in October 2009. The companies of the group are consolidated within Julius Bär Gruppe AG, whose shares are listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange.
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