Bank Julius Baer documents (Cayman Islands)

From 9 January 2008 I published through WikiLeaks documents from Bank Julius Baer's trust and banking business in the Cayman Islands. We said they purportedly showed offshore tax evasion and money laundering by wealthy clients from the United States, Europe, China and Peru. Many of the documents concern trusts administered in the late 1990s; the bank had said in 2005 that stolen client records from its Cayman unit related to the period 1997–2002.

On 6 February 2008 the bank sued WikiLeaks and its domain registrar, Dynadot, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California over 14 allegedly leaked documents. On 15 February, following a stipulation between the bank and Dynadot, Judge Jeffrey White issued an injunction disabling the wikileaks.org domain name and barring its transfer. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union moved to intervene to have the order dissolved.

On 29 February 2008, after a hearing, Judge White dissolved the injunction and denied the bank's request for a preliminary injunction, citing First Amendment concerns among the arguments raised by the intervenors and amici, and the wikileaks.org domain was restored. The bank filed a notice of voluntary dismissal on 5 March 2008.

According to our account of our correspondence with the bank's lawyers, the bank identified the source as Rudolf Elmer, formerly a senior executive of its Cayman Islands office. The Observer reported in 2011 that Elmer had handed me a list of clients in 2008. In 2005 Julius Baer had confirmed that client data from its Cayman unit had been stolen and attributed the theft to a former employee (Wall Street Journal, as reproduced by WikiLeaks).

Before the injunction was dissolved, the bank said the case had 'nothing whatsoever to do with censorship or the First Amendment' and that the documents were protected under banking and privacy laws (The Guardian).