27 Facts About Rudolf Elmer

Rudolf Elmer was born on 1 November 1955 and is a Swiss private banker, whistleblower, and activist.

Rudolf Elmer worked as a banker at Julius Bar from the 1980s to his dismissal in 2002.

In 2008, Elmer allegedly disclosed confidential bank documents to WikiLeaks detailing the activities of Julius Bar in the Cayman Islands and its role in alleged tax evasion.

Rudolf Elmer was rearrested immediately thereafter for having again distributed illegally obtained data to WikiLeaks.

Julius Bar as well as select Swiss and German newspapers alleges that Rudolf Elmer has doctored evidence to suggest the bank engaged in tax evasion.

Rudolf Elmer was hired by Swiss bank Julius Bar during the early 1980s as a private banker in their Zurich offices.

Rudolf Elmer worked at the bank as a private banker throughout the 1980s and 1990s before leading the bank's Caribbean operations from 1994 to 2002.

Rudolf Elmer did not take the test the first time around due to his health and then later failed.

Rudolf Elmer was then released from employment on these grounds, although he was still in possession of backup copies of data.

In 2005, Rudolf Elmer sold a Swiss business newspaper a CD with 169 megabytes of customer data, but was arrested shortly afterwards in Zurich on suspicion of violating Swiss banking secrecy law.

On 3 March 2008 the German magazine Der Spiegel revealed that Rudolf Elmer was the source of documents that appeared some weeks earlier on WikiLeaks; Der Spiegel referred to them as partly authentic and partly fake.

In 2008, Rudolf Elmer released internal bank documents with customer data and other sensitive details to the Wikileaks website.

On 17 January 2011, Rudolf Elmer met with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks at a press conference at London's Frontline Club to hand over two disks in public view of reporters.

On 19 January 2011, Rudolf Elmer was ordered to answer before the Zurich District Court for breach of banking and business secrecy laws as well as a charge of coercion.

Rudolf Elmer was accused several times by bank employees to have harmed "by violence and the threat of serious consequences" and supposedly a bomb threat against the main building of the bank.

Rudolf Elmer was sentenced to probation for a period of two years and fined about 5,600 euros on multiple counts of attempted coercion, threats and breaching of banking secrecy.

Rudolf Elmer was ordered to pay three-quarters of the court fees in the amount of 5,000 francs.

Rudolf Elmer had two days earlier handed over two disks with data of suspected bank customers to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks for publication as well as remanded data collection, which was published on WikiLeaks.

On 22 January 2011, Rudolf Elmer was brought into custody on the grounds of urgent suspicion and risk of collusion.

Rudolf Elmer appealed to the Supreme Court of the Canton of Zurich against the detention order.

Rudolf Elmer was summoned on 16 February 2011 before the court and testified that the disks were empty and thus contained no bank customer data.

Furthermore, the court found that there was insufficient evidence that Rudolf Elmer authored a "significant threat" against a legal services employee of the bank.

In May 2012, the Zurich High Court ruled in an interim decision that three CDs that Rudolf Elmer is said to have sent to the tax authorities or the business newspaper "Cash" may be unsealed and evaluated by the prosecution.

The criminal chamber of the Federal Court on 10 October 2018 - after a public hearing before judges - by 3 votes to 2 gave a groundbreaking judgment of acquittal in the case of Rudolf Elmer regarding violation of bank secrecy, and other matters.

The Federal Court upheld the complaint by Rudolf Elmer concerning the imposition of an advance payment for the release of confiscated data and documents as well as the modalities for the return of the personal data of the Elmer family.

The Swiss newspaper Der Sonntag wrote in a December 2010 article that Rudolf Elmer had confessed to threatening to kill several bank employees.

On his computer a letter to the right-wing party NPD in Germany was found, in which Rudolf Elmer offered the party certain documents.