アヘン王、巨利の足跡 新資料、旧日本軍の販売原案も（1/3ページ）

アヘン王、巨利の足跡　新資料、旧日本軍の販売原案も（1/3ページ）

2008年8月16日15時3分

　日中戦争中、中国占領地でアヘン流通にかかわり「アヘン王」と呼ばれた里見甫（はじめ）（１８９６～１９６５）が、アヘンの取扱高などを自ら記した資料や、旧日本軍がアヘン販売の原案を作っていたことを示す資料が日本と中国で相次いで見つかった。取扱高は現在の物価で年５６０億円にのぼり、旧日本軍がアヘン流通で巨利を得ていたことがうかがえる。

　日本側の資料は「華中宏済善堂内容概記」で、国立国会図書館にある元大蔵官僚・毛里英於菟（もうり・ひでおと）の旧所蔵文書に含まれていた。

　この文書には、里見の中国名「李鳴」が記され、付属する文書に里見の署名がある。毛里は戦時総動員体制を推進した「革新官僚」の一員で、里見の友人だった。内容から４２年後半の作成とみられる。

　文書によると、日本軍の上海占領とともに三井物産が中東からアヘンの輸入を開始。アヘン流通のため、日本が対中国政策のために置いた「興亜院」の主導で、「中華民国維新政府」内に部局が置かれ、民間の営業機関として宏済善堂が上海に設立された。

　維新政府は３８年３月に成立した日本の傀儡（かいらい）政権だった。

　文書では、里見が宏済善堂の理事長になっている。取引の主流は中東からの輸入品と、日本軍が内モンゴルに設立させた蒙疆（もうきょう）政権の支配地域からのアヘンで、４１年度の取扱高は３億元（当時の日本で約１億５５００万円、現在の物価で約５６０億円に相当）だったという。

　また、在庫として、満州国産モルヒネ９９９キロ、台湾専売局製コカイン２７７キロが記録されている。計６３０万元に該当し、「市中相場に換算せば約倍額に販売可能」としている。

　里見は戦後、極東国際軍事裁判法廷に提出した宣誓口述書で、自分は宏済善堂の副董事（副理事）で、董事長は「空席」と供述。幹部の顔ぶれや経理の詳細には触れず、アヘン以外のヘロインやモルヒネは扱わなかったと主張していた。

　中国側の資料は、愛知県立大学の倉橋正直教授（中国近現代史）が南京の中国第二歴史トウ案（トウは木へんに當）館で発見した。

　極秘印がある「中支阿片麻薬制度ニ関スル参考資料」と題する文書などで、この文書は３８年１０月１日付で軍特務部が作成していた。

　文書によると、蒋介石政権はアヘンの取り扱いを厳禁していたが、旧日本軍の特務部は中毒患者の救済を名目に許可制とする布告文案を作り、維新政府に示していた。

　文書は、浙江、江蘇、安徽の３省の占領地域で人口を２４９５万７千人とし、うち３％がアヘン中毒と推定。台湾や旧満州国の実績から、維新政府の税収を３１７３万元（当時の日本で２３２２万円、現在の物価で約１１１億円に相当）と見込んだ。

　当時、駆逐艦の建造予算が１隻６７６万円だった。

　付属する文書には、軍特務部から任務を引き継いだ日本政府の組織と維新政府が交わした覚書の内容も記され、アヘン収入の扱いについて、維新政府側と軍特務部の間で協議することなどが明記されている。

　倉橋教授は、資料について「表向きは中毒患者の救済を掲げながら、軍部が傀儡政権に膨大な利潤が上がるアヘンの流通制度を導入させた実態がうかがわれる」と話している。（永井靖二）

　　　　　◇

　〈里見甫〉　中国の日本語新聞の記者などを経て、３２年１２月、旧満州国の首都新京（現・長春市）で「満州国通信社（国通）」を設立。日中戦争が始まると陸軍特務部の依頼でアヘン流通を支配したとされ、「アヘン王」の異名をとった。敗戦後は戦犯訴追を免れ、政治・経済の表舞台に現れることなく死去した。

◆秘密主義者の詳細示す資料

〈里見甫の伝記「阿片王　満州の夜と霧」を書いたノンフィクション作家佐野眞一さんの話〉　里見は極端な秘密主義者だった。「右手がしていることは左手に教えるな」という言葉を生涯の行動規範とし、直属の部下にすら仕事の全容を教えなかった。その里見が、アヘン取引について自ら記した文書が見つかったのは初めてではないか。日本軍の主導でアヘン専売制が敷かれた経緯や、「宏済善堂」の業務などが詳細に述べられ、極めて貴重な内容だ。

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「裁判員休暇」協約妥結わずか６％　連合傘下労組
2008.8.16 20:59

　来年から始まる裁判員制度に向け、連合は有給の「裁判員休暇」に関する労働協約の締結を平成２０年春闘の方針に加えたものの、協約締結を妥結したのは傘下の単位組合約１万２０００のうち、約６％に当たる７４１組合だけだったことが１６日、連合の集計で分かった。

　企業側に協約締結を要求した組合も１０％未満にとどまり、連合は最高裁などに対し、裁判員休暇の創設を各企業に周知するよう要請している。

　労働基準法は労働者が公務のために必要な時間を請求した場合、企業側は拒めないと規定。裁判員法も労働者が裁判員を務めるために休んだ場合などの不利益な扱いを禁じているが、休暇を有給とするのかどうかは法律に定められていない。

　裁判員を務めた場合の日当は１万円以内、裁判員候補者として地裁に出向いた場合の日当は８０００円以内とされる。

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共産、社民両党が裁判員制度延期を求める
2008.8.7 18:17

　共産党の市田忠義書記局長は７日の記者会見で、来年５月にスタートする裁判員制度について、「国民の理解と支持は極めて不十分だ。冤罪（えんざい）を生まない制度的保証も整っていない」と述べ、同党として実施の延期を求めていく方針を明らかにした。社民党も同日の常任幹事会で「（裁判員の）辞退理由の可否や評議のあり方など多くの問題点がある」として実施延期を含め再検討を求める方針を決めた。

　両党とも裁判員制度導入自体には賛成だが、実施の条件整備が整っていないとして、延期を求めた。

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Lehman in talks to sell $40bn in real estate

By Henny Sender in New York

Published: August 15 2008 23:32 | Last updated: August 15 2008 23:32

Lehman Brothers is in talks with potential buyers over the sale of its $40bn portfolio of commercial real estate assets and securities in an effort to replenish its balance sheet.

People who have been in the discussions say the troubled investment bank wants to sell the assets either as a whole or in pieces but added there was a gap between Lehman’s perception of the value of the portfolio and that of buyers.

In a move to lure buyers, Lehman has offered to shoulder the first $5bn of any losses suffered on the portfolio’s assets following a sale, they said.

If the sale talks fail, Lehman is believed to be considering spinning off the entire commercial property division and listing it separately, people close to the discussions said.

Such a move might not raise much fresh capital but could help Lehman to dispel the concerns over its balance sheet and financial health that have dogged it for the past few months.

Since May 15 its shares have fallen by about 63 per cent while the S&P 500 index of financial stocks has dropped about 20 per cent.

Lehman, which has raised more than $13bn in capital after suffering credit-related writedowns and losses of more than $8bn, is expected to make a decision by the time it reports third-quarter results next month.

Those who have held talks with Lehman on the fate of the troubled division include BlackRock, Blackstone, Colony Capital, and J.E. Robert Companies – all of which have large real estate portfolios.

Lehman has been slow to deal with its commercial real estate portfolio, which the company valued at almost $52bn at the end of November and was worth $40bn at the end of May.

The portfolio includes mortgages and mortgage-backed securities that were valued at $29.4bn as of May 31. It also contains real estate assets worth $10.4bn at the end of May.

The scale of the operations is huge when compared with either Lehman’s market capitalisation of about $12bn or its balance sheet.

Lehman declined to comment. People close to the discussions said no final decision had been made on the commercial real estate portfolio.

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Man in the News: Mikheil Saakashvili

By Quentin Peel

Published: August 15 2008 18:27 | Last updated: August 15 2008 18:27

Mikheil Saakashvili

In the Kremlin they are determined to demonise Mikheil Saakashvili, de­scribing him as a “lunatic” and a “pariah”, and accusing him of genocide. Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s twin tsars, want him tried as a war criminal like Slobodan Milosevic. They flatly refuse to talk to him and leave no doubt they want him overthrown.

In Georgia, Mr Saakashvili is both adored and reviled. He inspires huge devotion from his supporters, who see him as a charismatic – and democratic – national hero who has stood up to the Russian bully. His detractors call him autocratic and impetuous, and accuse him of precipitating last week’s onslaught by Russian tanks.

Mr Saakashvili – known universally as Misha to friends and foes alike – was swept to power in 2004 on the heels of the Rose Revolution that ousted Eduard Shevardnadze, his predecessor, after a blatantly rigged election. He became, at 36, the youngest head of state in Europe, a passionately pro-American polyglot who toured the world selling the story of Georgia’s revival. He was the darling of neo-cons in Washington, but also managed to infuriate Mr Putin in Moscow, by failing to treat the Russian president with the respect he felt he deserved. (He is credited with inventing the nickname “Lilliputin”, an allusion to Mr Putin’s diminutive stature, in contrast to his own towering presence.)

Born in Tbilisi in 1967, where his father, Nikoloz, still practises as a doctor, and his mother, Giuli Alasania is a history professor at the university, he took a a degree in international relations at Kiev university. “It was less Soviet than Moscow.” he says. He then pursued post-graduate studies in international law at Columbia university in New York, and at George Washington University.

It was an experience that made him a profound admirer of the American system (he has since surrounded himself with US consultants and PR advisers) and laid the foundations for a whirlwind career in Georgian politics.

He was elected to the Georgian parliament in 1995, and became justice minister under Mr Shevardnadze, before he resigned in protest at the all-pervasive corruption in government. Elected mayor of Tbilisi, he founded his own party. In 2003, he led a mass revolt against the election result that had declared Mr Shevardnadze the winner, forcing him to resign, and clearing the way for his own landslide victory with 95 per cent support.

In less than five years, he has presided over an extraordinary economic transformation of his tiny nation on the shores of the Black Sea. From being a failed state in the 1990s, it became a magnet for foreign investors, and a liberalising darling of the international financial institutions.

Yet he has failed in his second goal – to reunite Georgia. And he alienated some of his original allies. “He is really quite complex,” says a former European ambassador in Tbilisi. “He is very intelligent, very thoughtful, and sometimes trips up on his own complex thought processes. He laughs at inappropriate moments. On the one hand, he is very open, an outward-looking modernising reformer, very much on our wavelength. He wants the system to be democratic. But personally his instinct is strongly autocratic. He has been leading a revolution. He is so committed to what he is trying to do, he went into extra overdrive to launch his reforms.”

In the process, he has lost support among the Georgian population, including many from the older generation, roughly thrust aside by the westernised young bankers and consultants who came home to help the transformation. Mr Saakashvili wanted to do it all at once – revolutionise the economy, and reintegrate the country. It was not to be done.

“He is an impatient man. He wants to move quickly,” says the ambassador. “The first signs of trouble came early on, when he was getting a lot of support and sympathy (from the west). They were saying to him: ‘Don’t rile the Russians. Take it calmly. Don’t use force’ and Saakashvili was having to grind his teeth, caught between his intense desire for rapid progress and the need for restraint.”

Mr Saakashvili’s name shows his family originally came from South Ossetia. He grew up a strong nationalist with a vision to revive Georgia. One of his great heroes is King David the Builder, who ruled the country in the 11th century, and drove out the Seljuk Turks. Mr Saakashvili took his oath of office at King David’s tomb in 2004.

But he does not sound like the fanatic that the Kremlin seeks to portray. He is certainly not a “lunatic”. On the other hand, he has always sounded somewhat ambiguous when talking about Georgia’s territorial integrity. He has made repeated proposals for political solutions – offering both Abkhazia and South Ossetia wide autonomy within a Georgian state – but has not seemed enthusiastic about meeting the separatists themselves, whom he regards as Russian stooges.

His mother has been a big influence, according to close friends. She sees the secession issue as manufactured by Moscow. “This problem is artificial,” she says. “It was invented. We never had a problem with Abkhazia and South Ossetia before.”

She rejects the charge that her son is impulsive. “He thinks very fast. This is his temper. But he always knows what he is doing.”

He can be charming and overwhelming – he never stops talking – although it is sometimes like a stream of consciousness, punctuated by digressions on Georgian history and culture, or his latest pet project. In government he conducts business at a furious rate. “It is government by mobile phone,” says one foreign observer. “Decisions are taken with a small group of insiders, working late at night. Then the rest are simply informed.”

Former allies, such as Salome Zurabishvili, his former foreign minister, left in disgust. “We are living in a de facto one-party system,” she says.

“He has an obsessive desire to win,” says the former ambassador. “That means really hammering people with different points of view – intellectually, and there is some evidence of intimidation. He has no time for a particular type of investigative journalist or a critical politician.”

Sitting at lunch last year, overlooking Tbilisi, he bolts his food, shoots quickfire answers to all questions, and rushes off to take a helicopter to the border. The skyline is littered with cranes. “Once all these new buildings are built, once it looks like Hong Kong did 10 years ago, attacking such a country does not look good,” he said. Perhaps that was why he was in such a hurry: his revolution came too late.

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Money heads for offshore havens

By Vanessa Houlder in London and Haig Simonian in Zurich

Published: August 15 2008 19:32 | Last updated: August 15 2008 19:32

Tax dodgers are transferring money from Liechtenstein to Panama, Singapore and other secretive offshore centres, intelligence from foreign tax authorities shows.

One official said the switch had been prompted by the greater focus on evasion after the theft of client details from LGT and Liechtensteinische Landesbank .

The banks themselves have said little about the extent of outflows from the principality. LGT revealed earlier this year it had suffered only limited damage. However, updated information when the two banking groups report first-half results later this month should show accelerated withdrawals, according to some local financiers.

One beneficiary could be Panama. The Sovereign Society, a US publisher specialising in offshore planning, says the country has “iron-clad financial privacy laws” and describes it as “an ideal 21st century offshore haven in a world where few remain”.

But Panama has constraints for Europeans, being less accessible than favoured havens such as Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Sue Holmes, a specialist in investigations at Smith & Williamson, a professional services firm involved in several cases involving Liechtenstein, said Panama was perceived as less secure. “It is a fairly risky place.”

Singapore, the world’s fastest-growing private banking centre, expected to gain from Liechtenstein’s troubles, Daniel Truchi, global head of Société Générale’s private banking business, told the FT in March. “Because of what happened in Liechtenstein, we will see a higher flow of funds into Singapore. The momentum is accelerating.”

Singapore and Hong Kong benefited from a 2005 clampdown on European tax secrecy, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the independent think-tank.

“In 2003 Hong Kong and Singapore experienced a massive influx of capital, apparently from European sources, as the adoption of the savings tax directive began to seem a realistic possibility.”

Tax experts say evaders can reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of detection by transferring money from one haven to another.

“Families with undeclared money can run, but they cannot hide,” says Philip Marcovici, a private banking specialist at Baker & McKenzie in Zurich. Ms Holmes says many people wrongly think they will not face detection. “My recommendation is to come clean. Tax havens are pretty vulnerable to attack.”

In a speech in June, Jeffrey Owens, director of the tax policy centre at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, condemned at least 10 countries for failing to recognise that secrecy is a “relic of the past”.

Panama was dropped from the OECD’s list of “unco-operative tax havens” – which now features only Monaco, Liechtenstein and Andorra.

But there is widespread frustration among OECD members that Panama has not improved transparency.

Panama has responded angrily. Along with other small financial centres, it has told the OECD it will increase transparency only if there is a “level playing field” created by member states meeting the same standards.

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The road to restitution

By John Authers

Published: August 15 2008 18:07 | Last updated: August 15 2008 18:07

Ten years ago this week, on the hottest day of a sweaty New York summer, an excited crowd gathered around a courthouse in Brooklyn to hear history proclaimed. A scrum of business-suited lawyers and Jewish activists emerged on the steps as Alfonse D’Amato, a US senator, read out a brief statement announcing that UBS and Credit Suisse, the two biggest Swiss banks, had agreed to pay $1.25bn to Holocaust survivors.

It appeared to bring an end to an extraordinary episode. For three years, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), in a self-proclaimed attempt to “write the last chapter of the Holocaust”, had pursued Switzerland’s banks over money deposited with them by Jews seeking a haven before the war. The WJC alleged that the Swiss had allowed these accounts to remain dormant. It said that rather than help Holocaust victims and their relatives to locate their money following the war, the banks actively obstructed them; survivors came forward with stories of being told by bank tellers to produce death certificates for relatives who had perished in Auschwitz.

The WJC, led by Edgar Bronfman, the billionaire head of liquor group Seagram, had a powerful team of advocates on its side. Israel Singer, a rabbi and Bronfman’s trusted lieutenant, co-ordinated a brilliant campaign for “moral and material restitution”. Before it was done, he had persuaded US pension funds to threaten the Swiss with the biggest campaign of private economic sanctions since the disinvestment campaign against apartheid-era South Africa. A group of the most feared lawyers in the US had launched a class-action demanding billions from the Swiss – even as Washington tried to protect US-Swiss relations from serious damage.

And what of the men who made it happen?

While the past decade has seen internecine struggles to distribute $1.25bn the Swiss banks agreed to pay Holocaust survivors, it has also witnessed the odd fates of many of the key figures in the deal, from humiliating defeat in electoral contests to political scandals to ideological about-faces that would have been difficult to predict back in the sweltering summer of 1998

Israel Singer
Secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress and the architect of the restitution campaign.

After falling under investigation from the New York attorney-general’s office, he was eventually fired by Edgar Bronfman last year. Allegations against Singer included accusations that he transferred WJC money into Swiss bank accounts not linked to the WJC, and improperly handled travel expenses.

The episode owed much to ugly political infighting, but it had broader significance. Singer, a polymath who speaks several languages and is a veteran of the civil rights movement, had been central to the campaign for Holocaust restitution. His charm and intellect, combined with the Machiavellian skills of a Brooklyn operator, were essential to it. His removal, quickly followed by the retirement of Bronfman himself, reflected growing disquiet in the Jewish world over the way the Holocaust restitution campaign had been handled. Singer, meanwhile, denies the accusations made against him by the WJC.

Mel Weiss
A leader of the class-action lawsuit that forced the Swiss banks to pay out. One of the richest lawyers on Wall Street, he made his money as the leading innovator of class-action lawsuits against securities fraud.

Earlier this year, Weiss pleaded guilty to paying kickbacks to a group of people whom he had arranged to name swiftly as plaintiffs, if and when a company in which they held shares ran into trouble. This enabled him to win a “race for the courtroom” and establish himself as the lead lawyer, with control over the distribution of fees to other lawyers who also brought suit. He paid a penalty of $250,000 and forfeited $9.8m of the funds the kickbacks had raised for him. He was also sentenced to 30 months in prison. Milberg Weiss, the firm he founded, is now known as Milberg and has paid $75m to settle charges against it.

Alan Hevesi
Comptroller of New York City, who co-ordinated a campaign by public pension funds in the US to levy sanctions on Switzerland, including a threat to divest all Swiss shares.

After losing in his attempt to become mayor of New York, he was elected comptroller of New York state in 2002. He was subsequently forced to resign in 2006, after it came out that he had used a state-employed chauffeur to drive his ailing wife around town, and even perform household errands. He entered into a plea bargain that led to a guilty plea on one felony fraud charge and a bar on holding public office. The New York Post’s epitaph for him was to publish his police mugshot on the front page under the headline: “Crook”.

Avram Burg
Chairman of the Jewish Agency, and the first leading Israeli politician to put pressure on the Swiss banks.

Seen as a potential Israeli prime minister, he went on to be speaker of the Knesset, but narrowly lost the election for leader of the Labour party in 2001. After his defeat, he took a walk on the Appalachian Trail in the north-eastern US, and then moved to France, severing ties with mainstream Israeli Zionism. In an interview published last year in the Ha’aretz newspaper, he said: “People are not willing to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall.” This brought fierce criticism in Israel, even from his friends on the left. He went on to tell The New Yorker that Israel was “obsessed” by the Holocaust. “Didn’t we cheapen the sanctity of the Holocaust by using it about everything?”

Alfonse D’Amato
Senator who held hearings into the Swiss banks, and turned it into a global political issue.

He lost his seat in the Senate three months after the settlement in Brooklyn. He became a consultant, and was also a court-appointed mediator in a subsequent, lower-profile battle between Holocaust survivors and banks in Austria.

After all this, the campaign reached its resolution behind closed doors. Edward Korman, the judge in the case, brought together the parties for a meal at a Brooklyn steakhouse, then locked them in his courtroom for two days of private negotiations. Lawyers for the Swiss banks proclaimed that the resulting deal “bought peace for Switzerland”. But in Switzerland, it seemed to confirm the widespread belief that the campaign had been a “shakedown”. After all, the Swiss had set up an independent panel, under Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, to find out how the banks had behaved in the postwar years. Volcker was still in the middle of the most expensive audit in history.

Meanwhile, an equally ambitious commission of historians, set up by the Swiss government, was studying Switzerland’s entire wartime role. And yet the lawyers had jumped the gun and demanded the money now. The issue of the Swiss banks’ behaviour had been rendered moot. In Swiss eyes, this seemed to confirm that the whole affair had always been about money, not truth or justice.

And yet the lawyers who had reached the deal angrily rounded on the notion that they should attempt to settle issues “with precision”. After so many years, they regarded the notion as a trick, and the Volcker investigation as a trap. Instead there was a sense of urgency. Claimants needed to be given something while they were still alive. Maybe money that could not be linked to individuals could be used instead on Jewish charitable causes.

Still, what exactly would “justice” for the Holocaust survivors mean? The WJC’s “moral and material restitution” formula seemed to suggest that “moral” and “material” were separate things. The banks were supposed to make a moral gesture, and then show they meant it by backing it up with cash. But many claimants took deep offence at this. They bridled at any notion of charity or moral gestures: this money was theirs, and had been for half a century. “This is not charity from the Swiss,” protested an ageing Estelle Sapir, who had months earlier been paid money by Credit Suisse. “My father deposited money there. It’s my money.”

For them, the moral victory that many perceived was not at all clear-cut. And over the following decade, the “material” portion of the equation – getting the Swiss banks’ money to its rightful owners – would also prove much easier said than done.

. . .

Anton Walter Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, had played no role in the events that led to the 1998 gathering on the Brooklyn courthouse steps. But three years later, when a list of 21,000 “probable” victims of Nazi persecution who held Swiss bank accounts was published, he saw his grandfather’s name on it.

Sigmund Freud, born to Jewish parents in 1856 in what is now the Czech Republic, moved to Vienna with his family just a few years later. He attended school, university and medical school there and rose to prominence at the turn of the century, as interest in his books and theories began to grow. When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Freud’s books were burned, and by the time Berlin annexed Austria five years later, the father of psychoanalysis had realised he would have to leave the country.

On March 10 1938, while American diplomats tried to co-ordinate Freud’s flight, stormtroopers raided his publishing house and his home, taking his passports and his will, which detailed his assets outside Austria. The Gestapo launched their own raid 12 days later and arrested his daughter Anna for interrogation. They demanded that a set of Freud’s collected writings, held in Switzerland, be returned to Austria, where they were “ceremonially burned”. “Of course,” said one biographer, “Freud’s bank account was confiscated.”

On May 25, Freud’s assets were valued at just over 125,000 Reichsmarks, on which he had to pay a “flight tax” of 25 per cent. This was paid for him by Marie Bonaparte, Princess George of Greece, a former pupil who wanted to aid his escape. The New York Times reported on June 4, the day Freud left Vienna for London, that his publishing house and “all his money” were confiscated. He told reporters at the time that “all my money and property in Vienna is gone”.

But that was just Austria. A little more than a month later, on July 18, the Nazi foreign currency office demanded that Freud turn over a Swiss account denominated in Dutch guilders. There was a lengthy correspondence between Freud and his lawyer in which Freud debated what to do about this, and recollected that he had been allowed by the Nazi authorities to hold on to this money to enable him to build a new existence elsewhere. He also wanted to repay the money he had borrowed from Bonaparte.

In Hampstead, Freud was visited by Anton Sauerwald, the Nazi commissar who had arranged his departure. Sauerwald, it turned out, had deliberately turned a blind eye to evidence that Freud had money in Switzerland, to make it easier for him to leave. Now that Freud had escaped, Sauerwald wanted to collect the money he had previously ignored.

Freud’s nephew would later write: “The Gestapo had graciously left him in possession of a sufficient sum of money to tide him over the first days of his exile. Shall we call it naivete or shamelessness when a Nazi official visited him in London a long time afterward and demanded this amount back?”

. . .

Decisions made swiftly in the heat of Brooklyn in 1998 took years of complex legal argument before they could be converted into cash payouts. Almost all the decisions went through many rounds of appeals, making the final arbiter the US legal system – even though the case hinged on events in prewar Europe. To make the deal more palatable for the Swiss, the victims’ lawyers had agreed that the settlement should cover far more claimants than just those who had held bank accounts. All “victims of Nazi persecution” who had suffered looting during the war had a claim on the $1.25bn. So did people who had been forced into slave labour for any Swiss company (not just the banks themselves); those who had been made to labour by companies that kept accounts at Swiss banks; and all refugees who had been turned back at the Swiss border.

It took more than two years to decide how to divide the money, a process that generated five thick volumes of submissions from around the world. Gays, gypsies and the disabled should be included, it was decided; political prisoners and “righteous gentiles” who helped Jews should not. Many people who weighed in wanted money spent on charitable work, such as reviving Jewish communities in eastern Europe, improving Holocaust education or providing daycare for elderly survivors.

What was becoming clear was that $1.25bn was nowhere near enough to make all the people whose hopes had been raised feel that they had received justice. It was impossible to compensate each individual who had suffered looting – the numbers ran to many millions – so instead Judge Korman decided in 2000 to endow an aid programme for needy Holocaust survivors. In order to concentrate the funds where they would make a difference, they were focused on survivors in the former Soviet Union, since they suffered the greatest poverty. This incensed survivors in the US, but made for relatively easy administration.

Still, had the lawsuit ever come to court, the people with the strongest legal cases for recompense were those with claims on accounts. Also in 2000, Korman decided they should be allocated $800m of the settlement. Almost nobody who had been involved in the investigations, on either the Swiss or the Jewish sides, thought it would be possible to find claimants for anything like this amount of money. That aroused resentment among other claimants.

And there was a further problem. For these people, “rough justice” was not an option. If it was possible to establish with some precision exactly what a bank owed to an individual, then the US legal appeals process would surely find that this should be done. That in turn meant that this money could not be paid out easily to charity cases, for fear that it would run out while people with strong legal claims against the banks still remained unpaid.

The business of matching each dormant account, opened more than 60 years earlier, would be an administrative nightmare. It would have to reach standards that would survive legal scrutiny in the US.

Even before the Brooklyn deal, the Swiss banks had set up a team of international lawyers in a Zurich suburb to adjudicate ownership of unclaimed accounts. Under Korman’s aegis, their work was greatly expanded. After a huge audit and further negotiations, they published the list Freud’s grandson spotted, and invited claims. Three-quarters of the accounts went entirely unclaimed; the remainder attracted an average of four claims per account; and an additional 27,000 people sent in claims even though their relatives did not appear on the list of 21,000.

The lawyers were told by Korman to give the claimants the benefit of every possible doubt. The problem had been caused in part by the banks’ destruction of documents, reasoned the judge, and that destruction must not get in the way of justice.

By the end of last year, the court had paid out $469m to 18,415 claimants. But most of these were token awards of $5,000 each to claimants whose cases were described as “plausible but undocumented”. A further 79,843 claims had been decisively rejected. The total of fully documented claims to have received payment so far comes to 2,597. Each of these received a meticulous printed adjudication, laying out all the evidence. They make fascinating reading – none more so than the decision on the account of Sigmund Freud.

. . .

Freud would die in London, aged 82, only days after the outbreak of the war in September 1939. His four sisters, trapped in Vienna, were less lucky: Maria and Pauline were killed in Treblinka; Rosa died in Auschwitz; and Adolfine died in Theresienstadt. There was never a more public case of the hounding of a Jewish depositor with the Swiss banks. But the records kept by the banks were nowhere near as clear. Investigators found one document bearing the name of Sigmund Freud: a customer card, showing that he had held one custody account and two demand-deposit accounts, one of which was denominated in Dutch guilders. The address on the card matched Freud’s. But the card also showed that all the accounts had been closed – the guilder-denominated account on June 30 1938 and the other two on July 31 and September 19. There were no details of the amounts in the accounts. Nor was it clear to whom the accounts had been paid.

When Anton Walter Freud came forward in 2001, it was easy to prove his relationship to his grandfather, and that Freud had been a victim of the Nazis. Walter Freud could even show that he had joined his grandfather in the flight from Vienna. Both of these steps would be much more difficult for other claimants. But it was unclear how much money Walter Freud was due. The published historical details of what had happened to Freud’s assets after he left Austria were quite weak. But, the lawyers reasoned, they could prove that the Nazis continued to hound Freud for his money, even in exile. And the date given for the closure of the guilder-denominated account was crucial. It showed that it had been closed 18 days before the Nazi currency office demanded that he turn it over. Further, Freud’s correspondence made clear that he still thought he had control over the account weeks after it had in fact been closed.

On this basis, they ruled it “plausible” that the accounts’ proceeds had not been paid over to Freud or his heirs. This was enough, given the tribunal’s deliberately relaxed standards of proof. The amount paid was a work of total conjecture. The average held in custody accounts in 1945 was SFr13,000, while deposit accounts had an average of SFr2,140. So Freud’s accounts were assumed to have been worth SFr17,280 in 1945. Taking into account changes in interest rates and inflation over the intervening 60 years, it would by 2005 have been worth SFr216,000 – about £94,000 in sterling at the time. The court wrote a cheque for this amount. It was much more than a token, and it represented the conclusion to an all-out and honest attempt to settle the issue with justice.

If this was the fate of one of the most famous figures of the 20th century, the problems for other claimants can be easily imagined. Even the matching of names to accounts was much harder than expected. Jews used different languages and different alphabets in different countries across Europe. For example, the archives at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem identify 1,398 variations on the name Isaac and 95 variations of the surname Berkowitz. The problem extends to place names: Yad Vashem’s memorial has nine spellings of Bratislava, for example, including “Pressburg” in German. Special software had to be written to aid the chance of finding matches.

The lawyers needed to look through birth certificates and marriage certificates dating back more than a century, and cross-refer to scanty evidence in bank archives for accounts that had ceased to exist decades earlier. This often caused painful delays that served to underscore the logic for hastily coming to a deal back in 1998. Walter Freud never saw his grandfather’s stolen money repaid. He died, aged 82, a few months before the tribunal would finish work on his claim; his obituary was included as evidence in their adjudication of his claim.

. . .

Many in Switzerland say the difficulties finding claimants for the material restitution undermine the apparent moral victory on those courthouse steps 10 years ago. But such a charge does not withstand closer inspection. The slower processes designed to reveal the truth of what happened have finally ground to a conclusion. Paul Volcker’s report, published more than a year after the settlement, refrained from estimating the amount of Nazi victims’ money the Swiss were still holding. In a conclusion carefully worded to appease the rival Jewish and Swiss members of the committee, it absolved the banks of “systemic disruption” and “organised discrimination”.

More damning, however, was the report by the commission the Swiss government had ordered, headed by the Swiss historian Jean-Francois Bergier. Unlike Volcker’s group, this commission found evidence of co-ordinated obstruction: in 1954 the legal teams of the big banks agreed with one another to refuse to divulge information about matters that went back more than 10 years. This neatly excluded accounts opened before the war whose holders had died during it. “The banks relied on a combination of discreetly playing down the problem and erecting barriers to investigation,” said the report. “Time and again they would bring banking secrecy into play in order to legitimise their reluctance to provide information while at the same time charging high search fees for conducting investigations.”

Bergier’s committee also found that the problem was not so much accounts that had been left open as accounts now closed – and therefore far harder to investigate. Due to fees, “unclaimed accounts, deposits and safe-deposit boxes could also disappear in the space of a few decades”. Once an account had shrunk to a minimal amount, “it could be cashed in”. Even accounts closed before the war, like Freud’s, may have been paid over to the Nazi authorities, in breach of the bank’s contract with the depositor. Beyond episodes where bank employees simply stole unclaimed assets, Bergier and his colleagues found that “legal principles were exploited for corporate objectives”.

Hans Baer agrees. One of the most powerful bankers in Switzerland and former head of the family bank Julius Baer, he is the most senior Jew in Swiss banking – although his upbringing was secular and he is not religious. He was deeply involved in the controversy. In his memoirs, published earlier this year, Baer makes plain his distress at what he discovered about the Swiss banking industry, in which he spent nearly a lifetime. “They, and all of us, came too late to the conclusion that the real scandal was not the dormant assets but the closed accounts,” said Baer. “It is true that nobody had organised any great plunder,” he continued. “It was a Swiss variation – unorganised theft.”

Baer had been shocked to discover that his own bank had charged a $75 “search fee” to claimants who had inquired about an ancestor’s account. Other banks had charged much more. By the end of the process, he said, “there’s no doubt that a good part of Switzerland fell apart. I could not have imagined discovering such improprieties. There was never a Jewish conspiracy. We simply became victims of our own smugness.”

. . .

In early 2004, Judge Korman decided to hold another public hearing. There was a risk he would fail to find takers for all the $800m earmarked for account-holder claimants, and he wanted to consult about how money left over should be distributed. The hearing lasted well into the night, and prompted outpourings of anger. Jewish community workers pleaded for the money to be disbursed immediately as an act of charity, so that aged Holocaust survivors could be given a little dignity. The WJC itself had floated a plan for a Foundation for the Jewish People which would spend the residue from the Swiss restitution settlement (and similar settlements struck with other European countries that were brokered in its wake), that would spend money on education initiatives. Many argued that it was absurd to link every last penny in the Swiss banks to claimants.

But the survivors who had first spoken to D’Amato back in 1996, before he started the public hearings that targeted the Swiss banks, felt differently. They were upset at the thought of the court distributing money elsewhere before all claimants to Swiss accounts had come forward. “In our age, it’s not easy to wait such a long time,” said Alice Fischer, whose family had been killed in Auschwitz and Mauthausen, and who had once received huge press attention as one of the first claimants. “And now we are discussing what to do with leftovers? I did not see a penny of the money yet.”

It was the view of survivors like Fischer that triumphed. Rather than use the Swiss pay-out for a big charitable gesture, the US legal system had pulled the settlement towards a different version of justice. Banks could make good on their faults, and the often long-deceased owners of their accounts could receive the dignity they deserved, only if the court made every last attempt to make sure every surviving claimant received exactly their due. That meant more delays and more frustration, but it was the closest to “justice” that the Holocaust’s victims were likely to get.

Greta Beer, the star witness at D’Amato’s Senate hearing almost a decade earlier, sounded dispirited as she begged the judge not to disburse the $800m until the search for claimants was complete. “Eight-hundred million is a sacred amount of money, Judge Korman,” she said. “It has survived the Holocaust. It has survived the bank manipulations and come here to this country. It belongs to souls who from their grave have made the money come here to the United States. And it has to be distributed among us.”

John Authers is the FT’s investment editor and co-author of ‘The Victim’s Fortune: Inside the epic battle over the debts of the Holocaust’ (HarperCollins, 2002)

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生活水準「低下している」34.1％　第１次石油危機以来の高水準

　内閣府が16日発表した国民生活に関する世論調査によると、生活水準が去年と比べて「低下している」と感じる人が34.1％と、昨年7月の前回調査より 9.6ポイント増えた。第１次石油危機の影響を受けた1974年（34.6％）に次ぐ高水準となった。物価対策と景気対策を望む声も急増。景気停滞と物価高が生活を圧迫している現状が浮き彫りになった。

　生活が去年と比べ「同じようなもの」と答えた人は61.3％と昨年比9ポイント減少した。「向上している」は4.4％と同0.4ポイント下がった。今後の生活の見通しでは「悪くなっていく」が同7.8ポイント増の36.9％だった。

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日証協、新型インフル対策に着手　取引継続へ当局と共同訓練

　日本証券業協会は発生が懸念される新型インフルエンザに備えた対策作りに着手する。証券取引所や日銀、金融庁などと連携策を協議したうえで、共同訓練を実施。実際に発生した際に株式取引などの証券市場の機能が損なわれないよう事業継続や連絡体制を整える。

　日証協の「ＢＣＰ（事業継続計画）対策委員会」のメンバーに各証券会社や東京、大阪の両証取、ジャスダック証取、日銀、金融庁の幹部を迎え、今後具体策を練る。これまでは各証券会社や取引所が個別に対策を検討していたが、官民の市場関係者が情報をあらかじめ共有することで、発生時の影響を最小限に食い止めたい考えだ。

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日立、海外での特許出願を拡大　10年度に５割以上目指す

　日立製作所は2010年度に、グループ全体の海外での特許出願件数を5割以上に引き上げる。国内に比べて特許関連の収入機会が多いことから、海外で特許網を構築して特許料収入や、技術を相互公開するクロスライセンス収入などを増やす。内外のライバル企業の技術開発戦略をけん制する狙いもある。

　経済成長が続く中国やインドでの特許出願を重点的に強化する。発電設備などの環境技術や、サーバーなどの情報通信システム分野で出願を増やす。新興国などの成長市場で技術的に優位に立つことで、製品の受注拡大にもつなげる考えだ。

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日水、養殖クロマグロ増産　09年度メド３倍強に

　日本水産は養殖クロマグロを増産する。年内に約3億円を投じて鹿児島県内にある養殖施設のいけすを増設、他の施設でも養殖する魚の量を増やす。2009 年度までに年間生産量を07年度比3倍強の1150トン（約2万6000尾）に引き上げる。国際的な水産資源減少や燃料高による休漁などを背景に、需要拡大が見込めると判断した。

　マグロの養殖はグループ会社の中谷水産（鹿児島県瀬戸内町）が国内の3施設で手がけている。今回増設する薩摩川内市の施設では大型いけすの数を3つ増やして計18とするほか、給餌用の船も増やす。

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太平洋セメント、鉄鋼向け石灰石を増産　山口に11億円で新設備

　太平洋セメントは鉄鋼の製造工程で使う石灰石を増産する。主力拠点の重安鉱業所（山口県美祢市）で約11億円を投じて石灰石の加工設備を増設。2009 年度から国内外の鉄鋼メーカーに年20万トン出荷する。今後、韓国やタイで製鉄所の新設が相次ぐことなどから、鉄鋼向け石灰石の需要が伸びると判断し、生産体制を整える。

　石灰石はセメントや紙の原料としても使い、粗鋼生産時にはリンなどの不純物を取り除くために利用する。太平洋セメントは輸出を含め年400万トンを鉄鋼メーカーに販売している。重安鉱業所では現在、セメント原料などに使う比較的不純物の多い石灰石を年200万トン販売しているが、鉄鋼向け石灰石はこれまで生産していなかった。

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三浦元社長、審理継続に　ロス郡地裁支部、逮捕状無効請求で

　【トーランス（米ロサンゼルス郊外）＝中前博之】1981年の米ロサンゼルス銃撃事件で殺人と共謀容疑で逮捕され、サイパンで拘置中の元会社社長、三浦和義容疑者（61）＝日本では無罪確定＝による逮捕状取り消し請求の第3回審理が15日午後（日本時間16日午前）、ロス郡地裁支部であった。同地裁は結論は出さず審理継続を決定した。次回審理日は未定。

　検察側は「共謀罪は日本には存在しない」と強調し、判決が確定した事件で再び同じ罪に問われない「一事不再理」にはあたらないと主張した。弁護側は「実質的に同じ罪だ」と反論し、議論は平行線をたどった。

　この日は検察側の証人として日米両国の刑法に詳しい専門家が出廷。「犯罪の実行を必要としない米国の共謀罪は、犯罪の実行が不可欠な日本の共謀共同正犯とは異なる法的概念だ」と主張した。

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三浦元社長：逮捕状無効審理に「初出廷」

　【ロサンゼルス吉富裕倫】ロス銃撃事件（８１年）の殺人と共謀容疑で逮捕された元輸入雑貨販売会社社長、三浦和義容疑者（６１）の、逮捕状無効申し立てに対する第３回審理が１５日午後（日本時間１６日午前）、ロサンゼルス郡地裁であった。米自治領サイパンで拘置されている三浦元社長は、インターネットを通じた画像でロサンゼルスの法廷に初めて出廷。法廷通訳を通じ審理を傍聴した。

　赤い服を着て携帯電話を手にした三浦元社長は、審理の冒頭、聞こえているかどうかの確認を求められ、「三浦和義ですけど、すべて理解しました」と答えた。検事、弁護士のやり取りに笑顔を見せることもあったが、審理の様子を真剣に聴き入った。

　日本で無罪が確定している三浦元社長側は、同じ事件で再び罪に問うことを禁じる「一事不再理」の原則に反すると主張している。この日は「共謀罪は日本にはなく、一事不再理には当たらない」と主張する検察側の証人として、日米比較法の専門家でミシガン大学のマーク・ウェスト教授が出廷し、「三浦元社長は共謀罪で有罪や無罪になったことはない」などと証言した。次回審理の期日は未定。