Sunday, November 23, 2008

OMG! UBS is dirtier than Phil Gramm's Depends

And the Miami Herald has some more of the real dirt on how UBS wealth management was just a cover for tax evasion.
UBS itself hasn't been charged with any crime. Bank officials say UBS continues to cooperate with investigators. Miami U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta, however, made it clear that investigators will follow leads wherever they take them -- ``to individuals or institutions.''

Much of the sordid tale has been unfolding before a grand jury at the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, where one former UBS banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, already has pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the U.S. government and is spilling his secrets big-time.

A much bigger fish -- Raoul Weil, who was chairman and chief executive of UBS global wealth management and business banking -- was indicted this month on a charge of conspiring to help about 17,000 U.S. clients potentially evade taxes by hiding $20 billion in secret offshore accounts.

Prosecutors allege that UBS bankers aided U.S. clients in hiding assets through sham entities, such as charitable trusts and shell corporations, set up around the globe -- in such places as Panama, Hong Kong and Lichtenstein, as well as Switzerland. The bankers allegedly advised customers with secret offshore accounts to misrepresent bank withdrawals as ''loans'' and to use foreign-issued credit cards to avoid detection.
It should be fun in the months ahead, to see who thought they were too smart to pay taxes.

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