Wells Refuses Belgium Claim

To the surprise and disappointment of Belgium’s Jewish community, San Francisco banking giant Wells Fargo & Co. is refusing to pay a $267,000 war-reparations claim under a settlement reached last year.

Wells is the lone holdout among 22 banks that were assessed a total of 53 million euros -- about $59 million -- in compensation for Jewish-owned bank deposits seized during the German occupation of Belgium in World War II, according to a U.S. official familiar with the case.

Wells doesn’t dispute the claim’s legality but believes it shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of a bank to which it has only a tenuous connection, spokeswoman Mary Trigg said Monday.

Antwerp diamond dealer Eli Ringer, a Jewish community representative involved in fashioning the settlement, said people in Belgium were shocked by Wells’ refusal to pay.

“It was not such a big amount,” Ringer said in a telephone interview. “Everyone was sure that a big American bank would not be the last to participate.”

Wells inherited the liability through its 1996 takeover of Los Angeles-based First Interstate Corp. A long-defunct corporate predecessor of First Interstate, Union California Bank International, in the 1950s acquired a small Belgian bank known as Credit Union of Brussels, which in turn held the Jewish-owned deposits in question.

A reparations commission headed by Belgian researcher Lucien Buysse traced the complex trails of custody of war-era bank accounts to the 22 present-day banks, including New York-based J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., ABN Amro of the Netherlands, Germany’s Deutsche Bank and France’s Societe Generale and Credit Lyonnais.

The panel’s findings, released in 2001 in a fist-thick report, were the basis for lengthy negotiations between the Assn. of Belgian Banks, an industry trade group, and the Belgian Jewish community. Their 53-million-euro settlement last summer was incorporated in a Belgian law passed in August that listed the banks and the amounts each owed.

Wells Fargo couldn’t find records of its own to either confirm or disprove the commission’s findings, Trigg said Monday.

“It is our belief that we do not have responsibility for what an unrelated bank may or may not have done in Belgium more than 60 years ago,” Trigg said, reading from a prepared statement. She concluded: “We abhor the crimes of the Holocaust and any form of discrimination or violation of human rights.”

J.P. Morgan Chase, the only other U.S. bank involved, paid its assessment of about $39,000 shortly after the settlement, according to the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

It may be impossible to enforce the assessment because Wells hasn’t operated in Belgium for many years and doesn’t otherwise seem to be subject to Belgian law, the official said.

The settlement was intended as compensation for unclaimed deposits that belonged to Belgian Jews in May 1940, when the Germans invaded Belgium and seized its banks. The original owners cannot be compensated directly either because no documentation exists or their entire families died in the Holocaust.

The money will go to a new foundation that will spend it on education, memorial projects and support for needy Jewish senior citizens, Ringer said.

Belgium is following the lead of other European nations, including Switzerland, Germany, France and Austria, in setting up restitution funds for plundered and otherwise unreturned Jewish assets.

At the outbreak of World War II, most of Belgium’s 70,000 Jewish citizens lived in Antwerp and belonged to the community involved in the city’s thriving diamond trade, according to historical accounts.

As traditional Orthodox Jews, they were easily identified by dress and appearance and thus were among the first to be rounded up and deported, many to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

An estimated 25,600 Belgian Jews, including a number of German refugees without Belgian citizenship, were sent to Auschwitz between September 1942 and July 1944, according to research presented at a 1989 conference at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and reported by the Jerusalem Post.

Of those deportees, only 1,244 survived the war, the newspaper said.