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Credit Suisse Group AG secured a court order blocking Geneva prosecutors from using details of a critical report by the country’s financial regulator into the bank’s failure to prevent fraud at its wealth management unit.

A Geneva court granted the bank’s request, made in October, to seal a 2018 report by Swiss regulator Finma, the Geneva Prosecutors’ office said. Prosecutors have now asked the court to lift the order in a bid to get access to the documents as part of an ongoing investigation into Patrice Lescaudron.

Credit Suisse, which is a party to the case, is relying on a clause in the Swiss legal system designed to prevent self-incrimination during a criminal investigation. The Zurich-based bank also invoked the right to keep confidential bank data secret.

Lescaudron is a former Credit Suisse wealth manager who dipped into client accounts to cover up millions in trading losses. While he was convicted in early 2018 and released in November of that year, numerous victims have appealed parts of the verdict, meaning the criminal case remains open.

Victims of the former wealth manager have long maintained that the bank should have more liability for his crimes. Geneva prosecutors have started a probe into allegations of forgery not covered in the original case and have been ordered to re-examine claims from another client about Lescaudron’s past behavior.

Officials at Credit Suisse and Finma declined to comment. A spokesman for Geneva prosecutors confirmed the order and the appeal, declining to give more details.

While a decision on whether to lift a seal order is supposed to be made within 30 days, such cases can often linger for months, as happened with a long-running bribery case involving Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Eni SpA.

Finma scolded Credit Suisse in a September 2018 report for numerous “deficiencies” in its money-laundering detection efforts in the case of Lescaudron, and how it managed assets tied to scandals at soccer’s global governing body FIFA, oil-producers Petrobras in Brazil and Venezuela’s PDVSA. The bank wasn’t fined, but was ordered to make a number of changes to bolster its compliance practices.

That full report wasn’t publicly released, but the regulator issued a press release last year that summarized the findings.

Instead of disciplining Lescaudron for repeatedly breaching the bank’s compliance rules, “the bank rewarded him with high payments and positive employee assessments,” Finma said in the press release. Credit Suisse has since adopted several measures to strengthen its compliance and combat money laundering, Finma said.

Codename ‘Dino’

Finma’s report, codenamed Dino, was considered sensitive enough by the bank that it wrote to the federal bank watchdog six weeks later, requesting that the financial regulator put it under seal, according to three people familiar with the correspondence.

To share it with Swiss prosecutors, the bank argued, would be neither fair nor consistent with Article 248 of the Swiss Criminal Code which dictates how and when documents can be sealed or should be returned to their original owners.

Any disagreements about the possible release of the report seemed to have died down for at least a year. But on Sept. 11, Finma sent a copy of the report to the Geneva Prosecutor’s Office, two of the people said, who didn’t want to be named discussing an ongoing investigation.

When the bank learned of this, a lawyer for Credit Suisse wrote to prosecutor Yves Bertossa on Oct. 4 demanding, once again, that the report be put under seal, the people said.

The report contains confidential information about bank management, the lawyers argued, which could do harm to the bank’s interests if revealed in a criminal investigation, according to the people.

Prosecutors may have been able to consult the report in the days after Finma sent it to them, but they are prohibited from citing or using any information from it as long as the seal is in force.

To contact the reporter on this story: Hugo Miller in Geneva at hugomiller@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Christian Baumgaertel

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