By
The Associated Press
GENEVA - Swiss bankers yesterday published a list of 20,825 names of dormant accounts from the World War II era that may have belonged to victims of the Holocaust.
The new names will be added to about 16,000 others published in 1997 to help heirs of victims locate assets, said a statement by the Swiss Bankers Association.
Yesterday's massive publication on the Internet is meant to be a final step in returning assets to their rightful owners.
"We expect that the assets can now be paid out to the rightful claimants as quickly as possible," said James Nason, a spokesman for the association.
Most of the accounts listed yesterday were empty and were closed decades ago. They were included on the chance that they were closed under duress and that the money might have been taken by the Nazis.
Since there is no way to determine how much money was in the accounts before they were closed, an independent panel has established different formulas to determine how much should be paid to claimants based on the type of account. The panel is led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.
The 16,000 accounts published earlier were still open and had some amount of money in them. In those cases, under Volcker's claims formula, victims - or their heirs - were paid 10 times the amount, to allow for interest and appreciation.
The bankers said they have no indication that the closures were anything but normal, but Jewish organizations maintain that the rightful owners might have been forced by the Nazis to close them and hand over the money or that the Nazis actually cleaned them out with authorization forced from Holocaust victims.
As of Dec. 31, some $33.5 million had been paid out to claimants of previously published accounts, Nason said. Of that amount, $6.4 million went to 232 people identified as victims of Nazi persecution or their heirs. The rest has gone to people unrelated to the Holocaust.
Volcker's panel, which insisted on including any possible accounts which might have Holocaust assets, told the banks to list any account that might have even possibly been linked.
