Bank of America prepares its defense line against WikiLeaks’ defaming docs

Bank of America is preparing to defense itself against the promised publication of discreditable materials about it on the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The company has appointed chief risk officer Bruce Thompson to manage a 20-strong team that will address the damaging insider info from Julian Assange’s resource.

In November, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes the site has a "megaleak" on an unnamed major US bank exposing an "ecosystem of corruption" that will be released early this year. The identity of the bank was not revealed at that time but it is widely believed that the five gig drive in WikiLeaks' possession relates to internal documents and e-mails from Bank of America.

According to the New York Times, executives at the bank held a conference call the day after Forbes published its interview as it sought to establish a defence strategy.

Thomson has set up an internal team of 15 to 20 people drawn from BofA's finance, technology, legal and communications departments, "scouring thousands of documents in the event that they become public, reviewing every case where a computer has gone missing and hunting for any sign that its systems might have been compromised," says the paper, citing anonymous sources.

By the present time the investigation has found nothing to support Assange's claim to have a hard drive, executives told the paper and one theory being considered is that the documents come from material given to the SEC, Congressional investigators and New York attorney general's office during investigations into the bank's acquisition of Merrill Lynch.