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UBS Pays $780 Million for Aiding 17,000 U.S. Tax Evaders
By Brian Monroe and Matt Squire
printSwitzerland's largest bank will pay $780 million to the United States for helping 17,000 U.S. citizens evade paying taxes on offshore revenue, the U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday. UBS AG will turn over the names of some U.S. clients to the department under an agreement with the Swiss Financial Markets Supervisory Authority and a deferred prosecution agreement with the United States. U.S. lawmakers accused UBS and Liechtenstein-based LGT Bank in July of shielding billions of dollars of taxable revenue from the Internal Revenue Service. On Wednesday, the Justice Department said that the bank helped to hide $20 billion in taxable...
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Former UBS AG employee Stephanie Gibaud in 2008 was faced with the choice of whether to comply with her employer's request that she destroy records potentially indicating that the bank had courted tax-evading clients. When she refused, the bank psychologically bullied her until she departed in 2012.
Not long ago, U.S. settlements in the hundreds of millions of dollars for violations of American law by a foreign bank seemed unlikely, if not out of the realm of possibility altogether. Then came the $780 million deferred prosecution agreement with UBS AG in 2009.
If the acquittal of Raoul Weil earlier this week was for Swiss bankers a sign of hope and for American prosecutors a signal disappointment, it was both for a single reason. The verdict reflected the limits to U.S. ambitions to punish foreign bankers.
A U.S.-Swiss plan to resolve a tax evasion dispute may absolve Switzerland's government from further action but will prove costly and time-consuming for participating banks, say attorneys.
In his 12-year career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Daniel W. Levy has investigated and prosecuted several banks, bankers, and financial services advisors that facilitated the evasion of U.S. taxes through the use of complicit offshore financial institutions.
For the second time this year, a U.S. judge has granted federal investigators broad authority to review a global bank's anti-money laundering records as part of an offshore tax evasion probe.
As settlement negotiations with Swiss banks continue, the IRS is turning its attention to jurisdictions outside of Europe, including two set to eclipse Switzerland as the world's top secrecy havens.
U.S. Fifth Amendment protections cannot shield Bank Secrecy Act reports from grand jury and other subpoenas, two appellate courts have ruled in tax evasion-related cases.
Even as Swiss and U.S. authorities near an expected settlement over American allegations of tax evasion, some financial institutions in Switzerland are informing their clients how to disguise money abroad, say industry sources.
Switzerland's virtually unregulated commodities market can be vulnerable to criminal tax evasion, money laundering and other financial crimes, all without the banks involved ever knowing, according to Andreas Missbach, the joint managing director of The Berne Declaration.
After over a year of negotiations with UBS AG, U.S. officials will have more leverage to reach a settlement with another Swiss bank that may have helped American citizens hide taxable assets.
A federal court Monday dismissed criminal charges against UBS AG after determining that the Swiss banking giant fulfilled its obligations under a high-profile deal made with U.S. authorities in August 2009.
Switzerland will begin disclosing account data on nearly 4,000 UBS AG clients within a week after Swiss lawmakers Thursday approved the handover, marking an unprecedented exception to the country's bank secrecy laws.
A decision by Swiss lawmakers to block a deal allowing UBS AG to turn over client data to the United States has left supporters of the agreement scrambling to find an alternative.
A Swiss official warns that the United States plans legal action if a deal to hand over UBS account data is blocked, China announces that it has tweaked its counterterrorism laws and Ecuador says it will be off of FATF's blacklist by June, in this week's news roundup.
A Swiss proposal of how to circumvent a court ruling that blocked an August data exchange agreement may leave U.S. investigators with fewer names of suspected tax cheats than expected.
A new IRS division focusing on recovering lost tax revenue from the ultra-wealthy has begun auditing individuals, according to a corporate tax attorney at a Washington, D.C. law firm.
Many tax havens have done the bare minimum to remove themselves from an intergovernmental group's list of regulatory-lax jurisdictions, at times only signing tax treaties with other bank secrecy countries.
A U.K.-based financial transparency advocacy group is set to publish a list next month of the 60 most abusive tax havens that will include U.S. states and British cities and territories.
It is an exciting time for IRS investigators who are now able to examine the UBS AG accounts of over 4,500 U.S. citizens suspected of hiding assets offshore, according to John Everett, a licensed criminal investigator and certified fraud examiner based in Agoura Hills, California.