The Banque cantonale neuchâteloise (BCN) has filed a criminal complaint once morest one of its employees, from whom it separated last year. During an internal audit, the establishment discovered irregular actions, which would involve several million francs.
The information was disclosed on Wednesday by the Blick.ch news site. It has since been confirmed by the bank. “The current procedures will have to specify in particular the perimeter, and, if necessary, the damage suffered by the bank”, specifies the BCN.
The scam was deployed between 2013 and 2021. An executive of the establishment would have taken advantage of his strategic role to enrich himself by stealing 10 million francs.
“The author of these facts used a lot of energy to avoid falling through the cracks of the checks. We can consider that these eight years are long, probably we might have come across them before. But we might also have come across them well following, with even more substantial damage”, indicates Friday Pierre-Alain Leuenberger, director general of the BCN, in the 7:30 p.m.
No accomplices
The Banque cantonale neuchâteloise filed its complaint on March 8 and the criminal investigation was opened immediately on March 10. Other charges might be formulated, beyond the single fraud.
The defendant would not have had any accomplices within the bank, as confirmed by Deputy Attorney General Nicolas Aubert. “We obviously have a case confined to a person who was within the bank. We do not have an organized system at all that would be endemic within the bank,” he says.
“Whatever the damage, it has already been integrated into the results published by the bank in the past, and no impact is expected on the 2022 results”, further specified the banking establishment. According to the BCN, none of its customers were harmed by the irregularities.
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