Dreyfus, one of Switzerland’s oldest family-owned banks which catered to Jewish clients looking to protect their assets from the Nazis, helping them to hide ownership of the assets from all government authorities, is to pay the Americans a fine.

 The bank continued to operate undeclared accounts well into the 2000s and will pay a penalty of $24.161 million to avoid prosecution over undeclared US-related accounts, the US Department of Justice says.

After World War II, the private bank, which was founded in Basel in 1813, set up Panama corporations to hold funds for clients so that they could protect their assets for reasons of personal safety. Among the Panama entity accounts were 33 US-related accounts. They had a combined value of around $90 million.

More than 20 years ago, the management of Dreyfus agreed to serve as a custodian for physical gold and cash for clients of an unnamed British Virgin Islands entity whose business operations are based in Switzerland. This involved 315 US-related accounts worth a total of $440 million in gold and/or cash.

Since August 2008, the bank held 855 US-related accounts with a value of $1.76 billion in assets under management.

At the same time that it announced the Dreyfus fine, the DoJ revealed that Crédit Agricole’s Swiss business, which focuses mainly on private banking and wealth management services, had also signed a non-prosecution agreement and was to pay a penalty of $99.211 million. Since August 2008, the Geneva-headquartered bank held 954 declared and undeclared US-related accounts worth more than $1.8 billion.

Lastly, Basel-headquartered Baumann & Cie maintained 167 US-related accounts, with a peak value of $514.1 million, and will pay a $7.7 million penalty.

Richard Weber of IRS-Criminal Investigation warned: “Although the end of the year is upon us, we will not slow down in our efforts to bring banks and US citizens hiding money offshore into compliance. The agreements signed today are further evidence that the Swiss Bank Program has effectively decimated the hidden offshore banking industry.

“IRS-CI will continue to use all of the information we gather from these agreements to vigorously pursue individual US taxpayers who illegally conceal assets offshore and to develop innovative strategies to combat international tax evasion worldwide.