The saga of Falciani, the man who sparked government probes of offshore accounts after he leaked masses of data, continues.

HSBC’s private bank was tight-lipped yesterday on media reports that a Spanish judge has released Hervé Falciani, the leaker of client account data from the lender, a day after he was arrested in Madrid on a Swiss extradition request.

The BBC reported that the high court in Madrid had rejected a request from Switzerland to remand Falciani in custody.

Asked about the matter, HSBC declined to comment to this news service yesterday.

Falciani, a French national, was in 2015 sentenced in Switzerland to five years in jail for industrial espionage over the leaking of secret bank data. At the time it was considered unlikely he would actually serve out the sentence. He originally fled to France from Geneva in 2009. He had worked in the private banking arm’s IT department.

His removal of client account data from the private bank triggered a number of probes by other governments, part of international pressure on Switzerland’s decades-old Swiss bank secrecy laws. A number of other banks, such as Liechtenstein’s LGT, Credit Suisse and Julius Baer, have seen client account data taken, in some cases with it being offered to foreign governments and jurisdictions, such as those of Germany. Under the Common Reporting Standard set of rules about exchange of information, Swiss secrecy law is seen as a dead letter internationally although it still operates internally.

The BBC quoted Falciani's lawyer, Manuel Olle, said the court's measures to keep his client in the country were "quite drastic".

An earlier extradition request from Switzerland prompted Falciani's arrest in Barcelona in 2012. But in 2013 Spain's High Court rejected the request, arguing that the accusations were not offences in Spain.
Switzerland denies that Falciani is a whistleblower seeking to expose wrongdoing and was trying to sell the data for money.