Swiss and American banks that financed South Africa’s apartheid regime are facing a $50bn (£34bn, €53bn) class action lawsuit brought by a team of lawyers on behalf of the victims of apartheid.

The apartheid reparations international legal claim, launched on Monday in Johannesburg and Zurich, is headed by Edward Fagan, the US lawyer who in 1998 forced Swiss banks into a $1.25bn settlement for victims of the Holocaust.

Mr Fagan is initially seeking reparations from US-based Citicorp and from UBS and Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s biggest banks, accusing them of financing the minority white regime between 1985 and 1993, flouting international sanctions. The banks’ loans allegedly allowed the cash-strapped pariah regime to buy arms and continue its oppression of the black majority.

Other suits will be filed against other companies and banks in Switzerland, France, Germany, Britain and South Africa that made money from supporting the apartheid government, Mr Fagan said on Monday. “Were it not for the conspiracy of these financial institutions and companies,” he declared, “apartheid would not have been possible.”

At a briefing in Soweto township in Johannesburg on Monday Dumisa Ntsebeza, the team’s lead counsel, launched a telephone toll-free number that any victims of apartheid – those who were tortured, detained, banished or forcibly removed – should call to lodge their claim.

Relatives of apartheid’s victims can also file suits. One of the initial claims has been filed by the mother and sister of Hector Petersen, the first student to be shot by the police in the June 16 1976 uprising in Soweto.

Mr Ntsebeza, a former commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the state- appointed commission of inquiry into apartheid-era crimes under the chairmanship of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said on Monday “the reconciliation process in South Africa will not be complete and meaningful for as long as the TRC addressed only the reconciliation that must take place between perpetrator and victim. That reconciliation should also take place between benefactors of apartheid and the victims of that evil order, between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor.”

The TRC final report in 1999 said “business was central to the economy that sustained the South African state during the apartheid years”, and called for companies to pay voluntary compensation but stopped short of saying that business should be held responsible.

Nicol Degli Innocenti, Financial Times, June 17, 2002