Daniel Thelesklaf, chief of the office, which is operated by the Swiss police, said that it had received 370 tip-offs during the year, mostly from banks. The amount frozen was five times higher than in the previous year, he said. Criminal proceedings were started in 63 percent of the 107 cases prosecutors followed up. Many of them were related to alleged Russian money laundering and the Swiss bank accounts of Nigeria's former dictator Sani Abacha. "It shows that rules against money laundering are being taken seriously by actors in the Swiss financial centre," said Thelesklaf. "The numbers come closer to the importance of Switzerland as a financial centre than did last year's figures."

$670m of the money frozen related to funds found in 17 banks after the authorities began investigations in the Abacha affair. But they had to be pressurised to do so, and the accounts weren't frozen until two years after new, stricter laws changed the banks' responsibility from a voluntary to a mandatory duty to report suspicious transactions or accounts.

The truth is that SFR 1.5 bn is a tiny sum of money in relation to total Swiss bank deposits exceeding SFr 5,000 bn, and it is asking a lot of bankers to report their rich clients unless their behaviour is blatantly criminal.