Ernest Backes

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Ernest Backes (1946, Trier, Germany) was #3 of compensation chamber Clearstream (formerly Cedel), in charge of relations with clients, and was fired in May 1983. According to himself, he was "fired because (he) knew too much about the Ambrosiano scandal." Banco Ambrosiano collapsed in 1982, but the scandal wasn't yet public when Ernest Backes was dismissed.

Ernest Backes was the primary whistleblower in Revelation$, the book he co-authored with Denis Robert and which in 2001 caused the Clearstream scandal. In 1971, he was hired by Cedel, set up in 1970 by a consortium of 66 international banks. With Gérard Soisson, Cedel's manager, he helped design and install Cedel’s computerized accounting system in the 1970s.

In 1975, according to Lucy Komisar, "several big Italian and German banks wanted to centralize their accounting and didn't want other members of Cedel to send transfers through their numerous individual branches. The Cedel council of administration - its board of directors - authorized banks with multiple subsidiaries not to put all their accounts on the lists. Backes and Gérard Soisson, then Cedel's general manager, set up a system of non-published accounts".

By 1980, Backes had become Cedel's #3, in charge of relations with clients, but he was fired in May 1983, allegedly because he "knew too much about the Ambrosiano scandal". Two months after his dismissal, Gérard Soisson was found dead in Corsica. And Soisson was the one to authorize each non-published account, "which would be known only by some insiders, including the auditors and members of the council of administration". "With Soisson out of the way, there was nothing to stop the abuse of the system, writes Lucy Komisar, explaining Ernest Backes' revelations. Whereas Soisson had refused numerous requests to open non-published accounts (from such institutions as Chase Manhattan in New York, the Chemical Bank of London and numerous subsidiaries of Citibank), Cedel opened hundreds of non-published accounts in total irregularity - especially after the arrival of CEO André Lussi in 1990. No longer were they just sub-accounts of officially listed accounts, Backes charges. Some were for banks that weren't subsidiaries or even official members of Cedel."

This system of unpublished accounts is alleged to make it possible to launder large amounts of money and to have been used by a variety of banks, among them the Russian Bank Menatep, the French Credit Lyonnais, and Osama Ben Laden's Bahrain International Bank. Allegations were made that money from the Taiwan frigates French scandal transited by Clearstream, as did the money from Elf.