TechWag

Wikileaks has issued a press statement via ZDNet that is well worth reading, as it looks like the bank Julius Baer was getting ready to go IPO. Now they are caught up in a widely publicized affair of money laundering, website takedowns, and blogger/press ire over the whole thing. Not a good day for Julius Baer, not by a long shot as now they have a lot more attention on them.

Wikileaks has discovered Bank Julius Baer was preparing to take their US operation public via an a billion dollar IPO. They filed the prospectus with the SEC on Feb 12, a mere three days before convincing Federal court Judge Jeffery White to order total censorship of the transparency site. Source: ZDNet

While convincing a court to eradicate a web site is one thing, the idea of burying bad news, or news that a company is busy doing something that they could not, and then trying all efforts to suppress that information is nothing-new (check out the consumerist). What is attention grabbing is that as the story unfolds, there is so much more there, and odds are highly likely that there is so much more coming.

This is one of those tip of the iceberg issues; we will by a long shot not see the end of this out of the ordinary event that is fascinating to watch. There is more data there, it is just a matter of time until it all comes out, but even with an IPO and filing with the SEC, the SEC would be diving deep into their bank, and seeing if it is legitimate before they would be allowed to trade on the floor of the NYSE. Eventually most of this would have come out anyway, much more quietly than getting a court judge to take out the entire web site.

Tags: web 2.0, funding //