In a stunning ruling, Swiss bank Credit Suisse has been ordered by a court in Singapore to pay $926 million to billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who served as the prime minister of Georgia between 2012 and 2013. The judgment is connected to Ivanishvili losing a significant portion of his fortune after he deposited at the bank nearly two decades ago.
Ivanishvili stated in court that he had placed $1.1 billion in the hands of the Credit Suisse Trust back in 2005. His attorneys successfully argued in court that the bank then jeopardized his money by failing to protect it from financial adviser Patrice Lescaudron, who was convicted of various investment schemes in 2018 (he eventually committed suicide in 2020, the year after his release from prison).
Thierry Tronnel/Corbis via Getty Images
In a statement, presiding Judge Patricia Bergin said the bank knowingly enabled Lescaudron’s crimes in a way that endangered its clients’ money, including Ivanishvili’s:
“It preferred the importance of Mr Lescaudron in retaining the big client, the plaintiff, with the Credit Suisse organisation to the compliance with its core obligation of keeping the Trust assets safe.”
For the bank’s part, it immediately announced its intention to appeal the ruling in a press statement: “The judgment published today is wrong and poses very significant legal issues,” the statement reads in part.
One of the only good parts of the ruling for the bank is that the $926 million sum includes the $79 million it had already paid out to Lescaudron in December of last year. But they’re also appealing a court decision in his favor in Bermuda, where in March of 2022 a court ruled they owed the billionaire another $600 million for their mismanagement of his assets. But, in another piece of good news for Credit Suisse, the court pointed out that the judgment would probably be reduced further in order to avoid “double recovery” with the ongoing Bermuda case.