Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director, said the fund was established to aid Christoph Meili with any legal or personal problems resulting from his decision to blow the whistle on Union Bank of Switzerland. During his regular rounds earlier this month, Meili discovered two bins bulging with documents in the bank's shredding room. Suspecting that something was amiss, he turned the archival material over to the Israeli Cultural Center in Zurich.
Swiss law provides for fines or jail sentences for people who disclose banking secrets.
The Swiss government recently approved a law banning the destruction of bank records that might reveal details about wartime transactions. And an independent Swiss-Jewish panel examining whether Swiss banks are holding onto the wealth of Holocaust victims will meet in Zurich later this month to discuss the Union Bank of Switzerland's destruction of documents. Hundreds of pounds of documents were shredded before Meili intervened, the bank said. But bank officials maintain that the documents were unrelated to the ongoing search for Jewish assets deposited in Swiss banks in the World War II era. I saw the dates of payments and credits.