In Trouble?
November 30, 2010: Bank of America Corp.’s stock dropped nearly more than 3% Tuesday on speculation that website WikiLeaks would soon release internal documents. Can Wikileaks damage Bank of America? Come on.
The Charlotte, N.C., lender, the nation’s largest bank as measured by assets has been trying to determine for more than a year whether any documents were leaked from inside the bank, said people familiar with the situation. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asserted in an October 2009 Computerworld magazine interview that he had the 5GB computer hard drive of a Bank of America executive.
In an interview published in the latest issue of Forbes magazine, the founder of the whistle-blower organization, Julian Assange, said he plans to release tons of internal documents from a major U.S. bank early next year. “It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” he told Forbes. “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron e-mails.”
While Assange wouldn’t identify the bank to Forbes, he had said last year in a separate interview with Computerworld that he had several gigabytes of data from a Bank of America executive’s hard drive.
A spokesman for Bank of America said in a statement: “We are unaware of any new claims by Wikileaks that pertain specifically to Bank of America.”
