- Key insight: The Swiss banking giant UBS is feeling pressure from a bipartisan pair of U.S. senators and a billionaire Trump donor to provide a full accounting of Nazi-related accounts at predecessor bank Credit Suisse.
- What's at stake: Amid allegations that Credit Suisse engaged in a cover-up, and as UBS looks to expand its U.S. wealth-management operations, the largest remaining Swiss bank faces a delicate political situation in Washington.
- Forward look: An independent ombudsperson, Neil Barofsky of the law firm Jenner & Block, is expected to file his final report later this year.
Two top UBS executives are scheduled to testify Tuesday before a U.S. Senate panel that's pushing the Swiss banking giant to provide a full historical excavation of Nazi-related accounts from the Holocaust era.
The hearing marks a milestone in a six-year-old effort — championed by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., as well as Jewish leaders in the U.S. — to reexamine Swiss banks' role in the Nazis' theft of European Jews' assets.
For UBS, which has incentives to stay in the good graces of the U.S. government, the stakes are high.
The Zurich-based bank is seeking a national bank charter from federal regulators as it eyes growth in its already-sizable U.S. wealth management business. In addition, UBS
At the same time, U.S. officials are facing pressure from World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder, who has close ties to President Donald Trump, to take a tougher stance on UBS' access to the U.S. market, absent a full accounting of Nazi-related accounts.
The scheduled witnesses at Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing include Rabbi Abraham Cooper, director of global social action at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which fights antisemitism and made a key investigative breakthrough on Nazi-related accounts in 2020.
Those revelations led to the launch of an internal examination of Nazi activity at the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse, which was sold to UBS under emergency circumstances in 2023. The review that Credit Suisse began has continued at UBS. Neil Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at the U.S. law firm Jenner & Block, is overseeing the investigation for the bank. He is also slated to testify on Tuesday.
The UBS executives on the Senate panel's witness list are Barbara Levi, the Swiss bank's general counsel, and Robert Karofsky, who serves as the company's co-president of global wealth management and president of UBS Americas.
"We look forward to engaging in a productive discussion with the committee regarding Credit Suisse's historic issues," said UBS spokesperson Doug Morris.
For UBS, the politics are particularly delicate in light of the checkered relationship between Credit Suisse and the bipartisan pair of senators who have been pushing for a thorough examination of Nazi-related accounts held in Switzerland.
In June 2022, Credit Suisse temporarily paused its internal review of the bank's World War II-era historical record. Later that year, the bank terminated Barofsky.
But then the tide turned. In 2023, after Whitehouse and Grassley subpoenaed and released an interim report by Barofsky, which included new revelations about Nazi-linked accounts at Credit Suisse, and after UBS completed its acquisition of Credit Suisse, Barofsky was brought back into his role as independent ombudsperson.
Since then, Barofsky has had a less contentious relationship with the bank where he is overseeing historical research. A little over a year ago, he commended what he called "the extraordinary level of cooperation that Credit Suisse, under the leadership of UBS, has provided since we were reinstated."
"According to UBS, it has more than 50 people working on the investigation, including its team of consultants and forensic accountants," Barofsky wrote in a December 2024 letter to Whitehouse and Grassley. "It more than doubled the staff otherwise working in the bank's archives to facilitate faster processing of requests for archival documents and hired vendors to expedite the work of scanning and indexing archival documents."
In late 2024, UBS was estimating it would complete its investigation in September 2025, according to Barofsky, who said he would then need several additional months to prepare a report of his findings.
There have subsequently been delays, but UBS has remained engaged with Barofsky, according to a source familiar with the Senate oversight work, who expects Barofsky to provide another interim update on Tuesday.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Grassley, said last week in a press release that Barofsky's work "remains ongoing," and that Barofsky intends to issue a final report later this year. Barofsky declined to comment.
'We settled. And it sat with me.'
The question that looms over the ongoing historical research is what, if anything, will come of it.
In 1998, Swiss banks reached a $1.25 billion settlement in litigation brought by Jewish community groups over accounts belonging to victims of Nazi persecution. That was widely thought to be the end of the matter.
A Swiss banking industry source told American Banker that all the world's leading Jewish community organizations signed the agreement in 1999, and that it covers anything that's in any way related to Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and World II, plus the war's prelude and its aftermath.
At the time the agreement was signed, it was clear that not all of the facts were known, and the settlement explicitly resolved both known and unknown claims, this source said.
The 1999 settlement is comprehensive and final, and it covers both accounts that belonged to the victims of Nazi persecution and those that were opened by the Nazi perpetrators, the person argued.
The
But advocates for revisiting the settlement have a number of counterarguments.
Among them: the 1999 settlement was signed by Jewish community organizations, not the actual victims and families; the settlement was premised on the creation of a large database covering all surviving records, but the Swiss banks never followed through on that project, leaving the large majority of surviving accounts outside any independent review; and the 1990s-era litigation was about accounts held by victims, not the accounts of the Nazis who stole Jews' assets.
Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Council, noted that Nazis took over Jewish-owned businesses across Europe during the years they were in power in Germany, becoming very wealthy in the process.
"When they saw it may not be as good to be a Nazi as it was in the past, a great deal of money went in these banks," Lauder said in an interview.
"So you have a confluence of different money coming in, and the money is staggering. And the reason why they're fighting so hard to keep it hidden and destroy as much as they can is that they know that once this is opened up, it's a huge bill to pay."
During the 1990s, Lauder was a member of the Volcker Commission, which investigated Swiss banks in connection with Nazi crimes, and was chaired by former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker. Lauder was one of the members appointed by Jewish groups; certain other commission members were chosen by the Swiss banking industry.
Lauder regrets agreeing to end the commission's work. He recalls being told at the time that Swiss banks had accounts holding a total of $1.25 billion of tainted money.
"I jumped up and said, 'Look, there's way more than that. We should not settle,'" Lauder told American Banker.
But Volcker and other members of the commission were ready to wrap up their service, according to Lauder. "Paul Volcker said, 'Look, I'm at the end of my tenure, and I'd like to retire.' … So I said, 'Okay.' We settled. And it sat with me." (Volcker died in 2019.)
'Finding the truth as best we can'
There wasn't much talk about revisiting the 1999 settlement until 2020. That's when the Simon Wiesenthal Center announced that an investigator had discovered "a list of some 12,000 names of Nazis in Argentina, many of whom had contributed to one or more bank accounts" at a Credit Suisse predecessor.
"We believe very probable that these dormant accounts hold monies looted from Jewish victims," the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote in a 2020 letter to Credit Suisse.
Credit Suisse soon committed to "finding the truth as best we can using the information and means available still today," but its efforts proceeded in fits and starts.
By late 2020, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, wary of Swiss banks following disputes in the 1990s, had been unable to reach an agreement with Credit Suisse under which the anti-extremism organization would provide investigative leads to the bank.
By the summer of 2021, Credit Suisse had hired the consulting firm AlixPartners to conduct the review of Nazi-related accounts, and retained Barofsky to oversee the work. That fall, the Simon Wiesenthal Center turned over to Credit Suisse the names of additional Nazi-related individuals that it believed had ties to the bank.
In May 2022, Credit Suisse shared certain interim findings with Barofsky, which he said "showed mixed results" — corroborating some, but not all, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's findings.
But the following month, Credit Suisse abruptly shifted its stance, according to Barofsky — replacing the senior executive who was overseeing the investigation, halting oversight and taking steps to curtail and eventually terminate the probe.
Grassley has laid Credit Suisse's decision to temporarily pause the review at the feet of its then-newly hired general counsel, Markus Diethelm.
Diethelm, who served as UBS' general counsel from 2008 until 2021, had the same role at Credit Suisse during its final year as an independent company, according to his LinkedIn profile. Barofsky wrote in his 2023 interim report that Diethelm "requested that the report 'acknowledge [his] role' in the Bank's decisions regarding the matter, saying 'I took ownership.'"
Diethelm left the bank around the time UBS completed its acquisition of Credit Suisse.
"Credit Suisse hid additional evidence of Nazi ties for years, and even tried to conceal information from our congressional investigation," Grassley alleged in a 2025 statement.
Lauder,
He started assembling a team that included former U.S. government lawyers, with the goal of revisiting the settlement he had played a part in reaching more than two decades earlier. They dubbed their effort Project Righteousness.
Key participants included Andrew Hruska, a former federal prosecutor who'd previously represented Credit Suisse in his private law practice; Brad Karp, chairman of the law firm Paul, Wess; and Allen Vine, a former senior banker at Merrill Lynch.
Lauder and his associates set out to identify potential allies in places of power, including Urs Rohner, a Swiss lawyer who was then the chairman of Credit Suisse's board. One idea was that in exchange for Credit Suisse's support on the World War II-era accounts, assistance could be provided to enable the Swiss bank's entry into the lucrative U.S. private banking market.
But by the time that the Simon Wiesenthal Center's findings became public, Rohner was already a lame duck at Credit Suisse. He'd said in early 2020 that he'd leave the bank the following year. At the time, he was bumping up against a 12-year term limit, and he was also under pressure in connection with a spying scandal that led to the ouster of CEO Tidjane Thiam.
By 2023, Credit Suisse was no longer a going concern. In March of that year, with market confidence in the bank plunging, UBS agreed to buy Credit Suisse in a deal engineered by the Swiss government.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Lauder had deep Republican ties as a longtime GOP donor. But with Democrats in power in Washington, other individuals involved with Project Righteousness sought to leverage their connections.
In a September 2021 letter to then-President Biden, Karp and Hruska proposed that Biden's administration name FBI Director Christopher Wray as a liaison to their Holocaust-related effort. Karp was
"Your support for this initiative will reconfirm the United States' position as the world's leading moral authority," Karp and Hruska wrote in their letter to Biden.
'There's a playbook … it just needs to be turned on'
Grassley and Whitehouse have vowed to be dogged in pushing for a full examination of stolen World War II-era money in Swiss banks. "Justice for those who suffered under the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their enablers demands that we leave no stone unturned,"
But even at a time when artificial intelligence can be used to efficiently analyze digitized records, it would take a big effort to turn over every stone.
The historical research has already stretched from Switzerland to Argentina, a country that served as a refuge for many Nazis after the war.
Grassley has asked for the cooperation of Argentina President Javier Milei in searching the Latin American country's archives for evidence of "ratlines," the monetary and logistical pathways that Nazis used to flee after World War II.
There are also documents relevant to investigations of Nazi-related assets in Russia, which occupied the eastern part of Germany at the end of World War II, according to Lauder and his associates.
"The Russian State holds more than seven million documents moved to the USSR from Germany. These documents — which are classified and have never been reviewed for this purpose — are the raw materials of history, detailing the assets owned by families throughout Europe before World War II," Hruska and Karp wrote in their 2021 letter to Biden.
More recently, Lauder and his associates have been arguing that the U.S. government should consider wielding a hammer to pressure UBS — by far the largest remaining Swiss bank — into reaching a suitable outcome on Nazi-related accounts.
There are large differences in the U.S. and Swiss legal regimes — for example, the United States encourages whistleblowing, while Switzerland criminalizes it. And though Swiss bankers insist the European country has a comprehensive framework in place to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, Lauder's associates say that U.S. banks must comply with transparency rules, while their Swiss counterparts can profit from secrecy.
Andrew Adams, a former high-level DOJ official with experience in national security, money laundering and sanctions enforcement, is a relatively recent addition to Lauder's team.
In an interview, Adams said he believes American law-enforcement power can be used in connection with Nazi-related accounts. He noted that U.S. authorities have prosecuted foreign financial institutions such as Denmark-based Danske Bank in connection with money laundering, and argued that the same enforcement tools could be used against Swiss banks.
"The notion that these are accounts that were tainted by theft in Germany and France and Switzerland and elsewhere, and have sat in Switzerland, and … there is not a U.S. remedy is one that I think is probably not true, but also one that I'm not sure has been actively pursued previously, certainly not during the '90s," he said.
Because funds stolen from European Jews continue to flow in international financial systems, "there is almost certainly some hook" for U.S. authorities, Adams said, "in the same way that we have brought cases on foreign financial institutions for sanctions violations, for kleptocracy, for money laundering."
"There's a playbook for this, and it just needs to be turned on," he said.
'Justice through restitution'
Donald Trump's return to the White House a year ago gave Lauder an opening he didn't have during the Biden administration.
Lauder has reportedly known Trump since the two attended the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in the 1960s, and after Trump entered politics, he became a big Trump donor.
The Guardian reported last month that Lauder was the individual who initially suggested to Trump during his first term that
Lauder hasn't commented on the reporting about his own involvement, but in
Though Lauder temporarily withheld support for Trump after the ex-president dined in 2022 with far-right activist Nick Fuentes — Lauder denounced Fuentes publicly as "a virulent antisemite and Holocaust denier plain and simple" — he has since repaired the relationship with Trump.
On Friday, Trump nominated Lauder's son-in-law,
Also last week, Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a speech in which he spoke about pursuing justice for Holocaust victims, survivors and their families.
"We reaffirm our commitment to justice through restitution — through restitution and compensation,"
Of course, UBS' relationship with the U.S. government is much broader than the issue of Nazi-related accounts.
The Swiss bank's U.S. wealth management business is sizable — as of Sept. 30, 2025, the U.S. unit accounted for 48% of UBS' $4.7 trillion in invested assets globally — and UBS wants to make it bigger.
To that end, UBS applied last fall to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter. Switching from a Utah state charter would allow the company to offer more retail banking products, including payments, checking and savings accounts, to its U.S. wealth management clients.
UBS announced in January that it had received conditional approval from the OCC. "This milestone marks a significant step toward securing final approval of our national bank charter, reinforcing UBS's commitment to growth and strengthening our position as the premier global wealth manager in the U.S.," a bank spokesperson said in a statement.
Final regulatory approval is expected later this year.
There's also the sensitive matter of whether UBS, in response to a proposal for stricter capital rules in Switzerland, could pull up stakes from its home country. UBS executives say the Swiss capital proposal, which came in response to the collapse of Credit Suisse, would make the bank uncompetitive globally.
In November, the Financial Times
According to the FT article, which cited three anonymous sources, the Trump administration was receptive to welcoming UBS. But the newspaper also described the talks as part of a campaign by Kelleher to pressure the Swiss government over the proposed capital rules.
A few days after the FT article appeared, UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti was asked about the possibility of leaving Switzerland.
"The truth of the matter is that we want to be a Swiss bank," Ermotti said at an industry conference. "So this is the best possible outcome, and this is what myself, my chairman, Colm Kelleher, we are working on."
"The rest is BS," Ermotti added. "So we never, ever tried to leave the country. This is absurd."
'Unfortunate situation for Switzerland, UBS and for the U.S.-Swiss bilateral relationship'
The attention on Swiss banks' activities during World War II marks a turnaround from the first Trump administration. At that time, the issues around Nazi-era bank accounts were considered well-resolved, according to the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland from 2017 to 2021, Ed McMullen,
McMullen emphasized in that 2025 interview that he was "not advocating that we gloss over anything that was done incorrectly," but he also described the issue's reemergence in the Senate as an "unfortunate situation for Switzerland, UBS and for the U.S.-Swiss bilateral relationship moving forward."
"If Markus Diethelm were still the chief legal at UBS, this would never have happened. He has an established relationship with the Justice Department, the respect of the Justice Department, which is why things were resolved in moving forward so well with the banking world, also in the past," McMullen said in the interview with Finews.com.
"Sergio Ermotti is a brilliant, very talented banker," McMullen added. "He has a team around him that has changed from his first CEO tenure, since this new regime involving Credit Suisse came in. That legal team does not have the seasoned relationships Diethelm had and used so strongly to ensure that these problems never arose and blew up in the face of Swiss banks."
Chana R. Schoenberger contributed to this story.
