Reply With Quote
Sweet, I say deport the offenders. After they pay their back taxes of course.
A Swiss Bank Is Set to Open Its Secret Files
By LYNNLEY BROWNING
In the hush-hush world of Swiss banking, the unthinkable is happening: secrets are spilling into the open.
Department of Justice Press Release
UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, agreed on Wednesday to divulge the names of well-heeled Americans whom the authorities suspect of using offshore accounts at the bank to evade taxes. The bank admitted conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping federal investigation into its activities. It is unclear how many of its clients’ names UBS will divulge. Federal prosecutors have been examining about 19,000 accounts at the bank, but UBS ultimately may disclose the iden ies of only a few hundred customers.
But to some, turning over any names at all heralds the end of the secret Swiss bank account, whose traditions date to the Middle Ages.
“The Swiss are saying that this is the end of Swiss banking as they knew it,” said Jack Blum, an offshore tax specialist. “Nobody will trust the security of the Swiss bank account.”
As part of the settlement, UBS agreed to cooperate with a broad summons issued by the Justice Department to turn over the names. Under the terms of a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, the bank and its executives could be indicted if UBS didn’t identify the customers.
UBS has said it is closing the offshore accounts of its American clients. But under the deal with the United States authorities, the bank must provide periodic written evidence of that to prosecutors. UBS earned $200 million annually from the business.
Prosecutors suspect that from late 2002 to 2007, UBS helped American clients illegally hide $20 billion, letting them evade $300 million a year in taxes.
In a striking admission, UBS said that from 2000 through 2007, some of its private bankers and managers had “participated in a scheme to defraud the United States” and the I.R.S. by helping American clients set up and conceal offshore accounts. The scheme involved falsifying or not properly obtaining or filing certain tax forms required of both the bank and its clients.
UBS’s offshore private banking business once employed some 60 private bankers in Lugano, Zurich and Geneva. Prosecutors claimed UBS referred clients to lawyers and accountants who set up secret offshore en ies to conceal assets from the I.R.S.
UBS urged some American clients to destroy records and to stash watches, jewelry and artwork that they had bought with money hidden offshore in safe deposit boxes in Switzerland. The bank also encouraged them to use Swiss credit cards so the I.R.S. could not track purchases. In a statement on Wednesday, Peter Kurer, the chairman of UBS, said that “UBS sincerely regrets the compliance failures in its U.S. cross-border business that have been identified by the various government investigations in Switzerland and the U.S., as well as our own internal review. We accept full responsibility for these improper activities.”
Marcel Rohner, the group chief executive of UBS, said in a statement that “it is apparent that as an organization we made mistakes and that our control systems were inadequate.”
In January a senior UBS executive, Raoul Weil, was declared a fugitive, two months after being indicted by a federal judge in connection with the investigation of the bank. Mr. Weil, a Swiss citizen, oversaw the cross-border private banking operations from 2002 to 2007.
UBS had fiercely resisted turning over the names, even after some executives were indicted and implicated in the offshore private banking business. Swiss law distinguishes broadly between tax avoidance, tax evasion and tax fraud. Unlike in the United States, tax evasion is not a criminal offense under Swiss law.
The move by UBS to settle the case, on the eve of a Senate subcommittee hearing next Tuesday on the matter, signals how close the bank came to being indicted for not cooperating with prosecutors. Indictment is a near-certain death knell for corporations.
Of the $780 million that UBS will pay, $380 million represents disgorgement of profits from its cross-border business. The remainder represents United States taxes that UBS failed to withhold on the accounts. The figures include interest, penalties and res ution for unpaid taxes
As part of the deal, UBS also entered into a consent order with the Securities and Exchange Commission in which it agreed to charges of having acted as an unregistered broker-dealer and investment adviser for Americans.
The settlement caps a painful run for UBS, which suffered more than $50 billion in losses in the collapse of the American mortgage market and received a $60 billion bailout from the Swiss government last October.
The bank will not have to pay additional fines and penalties, which could have brought the deal to more than $1 billion. People briefed on the issue said the banking crisis and the recession were factors in this decision by prosecutors.
Sweet, I say deport the offenders. After they pay their back taxes of course.
A question: Why is it illegal to store your money in another country, and therefore, not get taxed by the States on it?
wow it's a miracle. they are actually going after rich ppl?
I wonder how many millions the Kennedy's have kept from Uncle Same through trust fund loopholes?
meh. they still have good watches and pocket knives.
I'm guessing that if you earned that money in the United States, they want the tax.
people dont disclosed that sort of when it comes tax time, since the account in another country dont ask you for tax number.....where the IRS can track the number in all financial ins utions in your country.
Define "earned" though... sold, I'm guessing? I mean, what if I make goods overseas, then sell them to US citizens on the internet (with my server hosted in a non-US area), then bank off-shore. Would I even be liable to pay any taxes?
This is extremely overblown. They gave out something like 200 names. That's pretty much nothing.
The IRS just filed a new suit to get 52,000 more names.
If you never get caught it isn't. Discretion is the soul of valor, eh?
In a valorous attempt to protect their preciously bought gain from the amercements of a presumptuous and imposing government, the well to do and very many others squirrel their wealth away secretly. smeagal, are you listening?
Yet others, like me and my good buddy Tim Geithner, merely forget to pay from time to time.
Consider this: the primary forensics detect no record of trading in the Madoff affair. It may well have been a pure ponzi. How long did it last again?
Last edited by Winehole23; 02-20-2009 at 07:42 PM.
Cause you made that money here, and horded it away so it couldn't be taxed, when it should be taxed cause you made it here.
Yes, but define "made it here". If you're selling from an off-shore site to Americans, does that count as "making it here"?
Income is income.
If foreign income was not taxable, then all I had to do was to simply take all of my money, invest it someplace stable like Europe or Japan, and sit back and grow wealthy on that income without ever paying income taxes. All of my capital/savings would benefit some other country, because I would build a rental house or similar means of income production.
Most foreign governments have tax treaties where the government there pledges not to tax that income if the US does, and vice/versa or that some tax credit is given for taxes paid in another country, i.e if you pay 2000 in taxes to that goverment, you get a 2000 credit towards your taxes here.
It is not illegal to put your money in other countries, but you still must pay income taxes on the income it generates.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 02-24-2009 at 10:10 AM.
I'd be very interested to see the entirety of their clientele list.
Im thinking Senators/Congressmen are prone to show up here and there.
a couple of months ago me and my friends were drinkn and sittin around talkin about whether to buy gold or foreign exchange
one friend had a friend who worked in some swiss bank recommended to buy gold at the time cause it was going to skyrocket...while the other a BA recommended to buy USA currency...and we all know how it all went today. But buying gold is no point if ur not buying bullion gold, fkn ounces dont do or have good turn over.
while the other is buyin gold, the BA took on more investments during these economic times.....
Here's the thing about gold:
If you bought $300 worth of gold in 1980, today you would have: $1000.
Tidy profit of $700 or 233%.
If you bought $300 worth of say, Ford common stock, you would have: $57,000+, if my memory of my calculations is correct.
56600/300= 18,867% profit.
57>1
It is always better to have 25 years worth of ownership of positive cash flows than to have 25 years worth of ownership in a static asset.
The problem with gold is that it is at some pretty historic highs at the moment and has a rather thin demand curve.
If you think the market is going down, and you have $10000 to invest, then invest $1000 per month for ten months, and keep up the investment.
You don't have to worry about when it will start going up again and missing out on that uptick. Dollar cost averaging baby.
unless the shares you bought the company goes busts....sometime now and in future, than ur notes are worth all.
The same BA friend had notes in a company that was trading very well b4 the recession...was trading at $35...lol he bought them at $30-35 then recession came along and now the prices of them shares went down to under 50cents and i think they are in administration atm......another friend jumped onto the bandwagon at one point when it was trading at $5 and bought in 5k worth of shares and saw it not recover around its peak and bombed out...i think the wanker lost his investment capital, shouldve pulled out.....
i also had a few friends who worked in banks, salary packages with shares lmao...now those shares are worth compared to what they were at the same time last year.....its probably even lesser than what the banks were paying these guys per hour for there job position.....
if ima invest, i buy utility company stocks, cause people will have to pay their gas/water/electricity bills anyway in any event
You are exactly right about that. If the company goes under your investment is worthless.unless the shares you bought the company goes busts....sometime now and in future, than ur notes are worth all.
The same BA friend had notes in a company that was trading very well b4 the recession...was trading at $35...lol he bought them at $30-35 then recession came along and now the prices of them shares went down to under 50cents and i think they are in administration atm......another friend jumped onto the bandwagon at one point when it was trading at $5 and bought in 5k worth of shares and saw it not recover around its peak and bombed out...i think the wanker lost his investment capital, shouldve pulled out.....
i also had a few friends who worked in banks, salary packages with shares lmao...now those shares are worth compared to what they were at the same time last year.....its probably even lesser than what the banks were paying these guys per hour for there job position.....
if ima invest, i buy utility company stocks, cause people will have to pay their gas/water/electricity bills anyway in any event
Larger companies tend to fail at much lower rates than small ones, though. You can limit your risk of this by only investing in large companies, and as you mentioned, utilities.
Everyone will give money to say, Coke, Inc. or Pespi, Inc. but no one will give money to RandomGuy's Itty Bitty Bottling Company, Inc. without demanding a a lot of compensation for their risk.
This is why it is cheaper/easier for large companies to acquire investment capital, by the way.
Also, stockholders ask for a higher rate of return then lenders for the very reason that if the company goes under, they stand in line behind the bondholders for the leftovers.
This risk means that stock "costs" more to a company than debt. When a company is considering whether to get money for a new factory/building, they generally prefer to borrow the money, rather than issue stock. There is some good balance though to doing both, and most companies try to maintain a specific ratio of equity to debt. ( the specific terms are t
"capital structure" for that ratio, and they use the weighted average cost of capital to determine if a project will make money)
Gold is more like insurance than an investment.
I'll be very pissed when I send off the rothIRA check this year as I have 0 confidence in the system/future impact of so much government interaction when dealing with growth, but 40 years of compound interest is still a sexy little thang that The Lockbeard wants a piece of.
So there's no point in putting your money into a foreign bank, unless A) the interest/perks are great, B) you're concerned about the well-being of American banks or C) you can hide it there.
Thanks!
You should see the upward curve for palladium... wished I'd invested in that. Well, I wish I had been born early enough to invest in that.
In the US lot of banks in the middle are doing alright and continue to service the creditworthy.
Oh I have no doubt about that. I actually bank through a credit union. I was just listing that as a possible reason for banking overseas instead of stateside.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
