The defendant does not hold information about any occasional customer who comes to his door and wishes to open an account with him, and the burden imposed on him is to carry out an inquiry using the means at his disposal – whether by means of material that the client is supposed to provide him, and thus the plaintiff ceased, or from external sources of information.
The defendant did so, and in open publications he found information that prima facie indicates that even before the plaintiff's sister-in-law served as a cover for the management of the club for her, it was the deceased who actually operated it under the guise of another "straw man", and even additional ownership transfers described there indicate the use of various cover-ups to conceal the couple's involvement in its management (Exhibit E of the defendant's exhibits).
In these circumstances, and in view of this suspicious information that the defendant had before his eyes, even if he erred in that the deceased was not ultimately convicted, he had sufficient administrative evidence before him to establish a reasonable suspicion that would justify his refusal to open an account before the picture was fully clarified.
It should be noted once again that the defendant is not required to substantiate his suspicion with evidence as required in a civil proceeding, and administrative evidence is sufficient (see paragraph 25 in the Toledano case and Civil Appeal Authority 9065/23 S.A. Top Investments in Tax Appeal v. Mercantile Discount Bank in Tax Appeal (January 30, 2024) paragraphs 42-43 and more).
Another fact, in relation to which the plaintiff also seeks to claim that the bank ceased – by collecting evidence from the Internet – is not an omission at all, since section 30 of Procedure 411 explicitly instructs the banks to obtain information about customers who knock on their doors with a request to open an account, and in respect of which a high risk was also identified "from open sources such as the Internet", and in this case it was even proven that the press publications on the Internet were consistent with official publications of the Ministry of Justice, which were also part of the database that the defendant had in mind.