Plan to release info related to US bank next yr: WikiLeaks

Whistle-blower website WikiLeaks plans to release hundreds of thousands of internal documents related to a major American bank early next year, according to a media report.

In an interview to Forbes magazine earlier this month, WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange said a "mega leak" related to a US bank will be put up on its website.

"It's not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it's either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents, depending on how you define it," Assange said.

Without disclosing specific details, he said the leaked documents would be hosted on the WikiLeaks website early next year and would be related to a big American bank.

In reply to a question on what he hoped to achieve by making the leaked documents available in the public domain, Assange said, "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."

Assange compared the leaked documents of the US bank to the emails that were revealed after the collapse of US energy major Enron.

"... There's only one similar example. It's like the Enron emails... When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed," he added.

Assange said that WikiLeaks is also in possession of unprocessed information on pharmaceutical companies, besides "some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage."

WikiLeaks has already started releasing thousands of highly-confidential US diplomatic communications.