Holocaust lawyer takes second shot at Swiss - over apartheid

Published on Sunday 14 July 2002 01:00

HE HAS been dismissed as "greedy", "publicity-seeking" and "an embarrassment to the legal profession" in his battle to secure billion-dollar compensation for Holocaust victims and their heirs.

But now New York lawyer Ed Fagan has returned to the limelight with an even more sensational lawsuit.

Next month a district court in New York will consider Fagan’s latest class-action lawsuit against some of the world’s biggest banks and corporations in Britain, Switzerland, Germany, France and the US for as much as $100bn compensation for as many as 20,000 victims of apartheid in South Africa.

Fagan was one of the first US lawyers to take up the case against Swiss banks which held on to the deposits of Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust and file slave labour claims against German industry. He fast gained a reputation for publicity stunts, such as persuading elderly survivors to recount their Holocaust experiences on his German media "road show".

Now Fagan compares South Africa under apartheid to Nazi Germany and accuses companies that did business with the country of perpetuating a repressive, racist regime and a sharing responsibility for state killings and torture.

His suit singles out Swiss banks for propping up the bankrupt regime with loans while other companies withdrew business under 1985-1993 UN sanctions, and also targets Barclays, NatWest, Standard Chartered, US-based Citigroup - which owns Citibank - German banks Deutsche, Commerzbank and Dresdner, five computer firms including IBM, and oil companies Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil. A lawsuit may be filed to a court in the US against companies with an American branch.

"Why is it that when it comes to Jewish victims of the Holocaust asking for reparations, the world says that’s OK, but when blacks stand up and say we’re victims of apartheid, that’s not OK," Fagan said.

But Swiss banking giants Credit Suisse and UBS, which only coughed up and agreed to a $1.25bn settlement in 1998 to Jewish claims under massive US political and economic pressure, deny liability.

"This is very different to the World War Two case and political pressure could not come to bear," said Urs Roth, chief executive officer of the Swiss Bankers’ Association.

"Ed Fagan is a businessman, he tried to make money, which you saw with the Holocaust transactions. It’s not a Swiss issue, it’s an international issue. Swiss business did not discriminate against the population of South Africa. It was the government of South Africa that did that," Roth said.

Though still arguably lacking in compassion, this time the gnomes of Zurich and Geneva may be correct in law. Even in South Africa, where most people regard themselves as victims of white rule, the lawsuit has been met with caution.

Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel peace laureate who headed South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said: "If we are able to get even a fraction of what he claims he can get, are we going to sniff at it?" But he also urged "sensitivity" so as not to "re-traumatise people".

Fagan’s claims hotline has received more than 2,000 calls from potential victims, well short of the 20,000 victims of serious abuses identified by the Commission.

At the start of a 30-day "road-show" in Cape Town last week to find more victims across South Africa, Fagan denied suggestions he was "in it for the bucks" or that he was unnecessarily "raising the expectations" of victims.