Swiss bank UBS to disclose secret account details

UBS, the Swiss banking behemoth, will pay a $780 million penalty to the US Justice Department and disclose the names of many secret account holders as part of an agreement to avoid prosecution, in a major change from traditional client secrecy.

The penalty is due to the bank’s help in enabling, goes the charge, thousands of Americans to evade income tax, in breach of regulations, a charge that UBS has partially accepted.

"UBS sincerely regrets the compliance failures in its US cross-border business that have been identified by the various government investigations in Switzerland and the US, as well as our own internal review," said Peter Kurer, the bank’s chairman, in a statement.

"We accept full responsibility for these improper activities," he added, suggesting that "client confidentiality, to which UBS remains committed, was never designed to protect fraudulent acts."

In a separate development, the Swiss Federal Banking Commission has pronounced that "UBS violated the requirements for proper business conduct." The bank also got a severe rap from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, which said UBS has "severely breached" its obligations under law.

The bank would have faced prosecution by US authorities if it had not reached this agreement. The US will drop the charge in 18 months if the bank will turn over an agreed number of names, helps prosecutors and pays the penalty. The penalty would have been much larger if the bank hadn’t been also making record losses; it has announced major job cuts, got out of parts of debt trading and in commodities and posted a loss of about $6.5 billion in the last quarter

this development is bound to undermine Switzerland’s status as the world’s leading tax haven. Germany and Britain are preparing ground for a concerted crackdown on tax havens, particularly Switzerland. They are expected to join forces for a major agreement on a tough regulatory framework to stop tax and banking fraud, to be discussed at the upcoming G-20 heads of nations meeting on April 2 in London, analysts said.

The major charge against UBS is that it conspired to defraud the US tax authorities which were denied access to funds held by rich Americans. The US authorities says about 17,000 of 20,000 cross-border clients held funds to the tune of $ 20 billion to evade taxes.

The Swiss government’s okay to this admission by UBS is a new development. Till now, the Swiss government did not share data with foreign tax authorities in cases concerning tax evasion.

With inputs from Bloomberg

In the US, tax evasion is a crime. Swiss law does not regard it so; they view tax fraud as a serious offence. For some time now, the US and Germany have been pressing Switzerland to give up its tax secrecy laws. This agreement between UBS and the US tax authorities marks a watershed in the secrecy laws that helped build the world’s most powerful offshore banking center in Switzerland.

"For Switzerland, it is a true catastrophe for the country’s first industry, that is to say the banking center," Charles Poncet, a Geneva-based attorney and former lawmaker, told Reuters.

The agreement would have far-reaching implications for Switzerland’s effort to stay as the world’s leading offshore banking center, analysts said.

Is India a poor Country- Revelation on Swiss bank accounts

Don’t know how far this is true, but a friend of mine forwarded me this

This is so shocking…….wish black money deposits was an Olympics event….India would have won a gold medal hands down. The second best Russia has 4 times lesser deposit. US is not even there in the counting in top five !! India has more money in swiss banks than all the other countries
combined

Recently, due to international pressure, Swiss govt. agreed to disclose the names of the account holders only if the respective govts formally asked for it. Indian govt. is not asking for the details…….no marks for guessing why ????

We need to start a movement to pressurize the govt. to do so !! this is perhaps the only way, and a golden opportunity, to expose the high and mighty and weed out corruption !!

Please read on……and forward to all the honest Indians to…..like somebody is forwarding to you…….and build a ground-swell of support for action !!

Is India poor, who says? Ask Swiss banks With personal account deposit bank of $1500 billion in foreign reserve which have been misappropriated, an amount 13 times larger than the country’s foreign debt, one needs to rethink if India is a poor country?.

DISHONEST INDUSTRIALISTS, scandalous politicians and corrupt IAS, IRS, IPS officers have deposited in foreign banks in their illegal personal accounts a sum of about $ 1500 billion, which have been misappropriated by them.

This amount is about 13 times larger than the country’s foreign debt. With this amount 45 crore poor people can get Rs 1,00,000 each. This huge amount has been appropriated from the people of India by exploiting and betraying
them.

Once this huge amount of black money and property comes back to India , the entire foreign debt can be repaid in 24 hours. After paying the entire foreign debt, we will have surplus amount, almost 12 times larger than the foreign debt. If this surplus amount is invested in earning interest, the amount of interest will be more than the annual budget of the Central government. So even if all the taxes are abolished, then also the Central government will be able to maintain the country very comfortably.

Some 80,000 people travel to Switzerland every year, of whom 25,000 travel very frequently.

“Obviously, these people won’t be tourists. They must be travelling there for some other reason,” believes an official involved in tracking illegal money. And, clearly, he isn’t referring to the commerce ministry bureaucrats who’ve been flitting in and out of Geneva ever since the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations went into a tailspin!

Just read the following details and note how thesedishonest industrialists, scandalous politicians, corrupt officers, cricketers, film actors, illegal sex trade and protected wildlife operators, to name just a few, sucked this country’s wealth and prosperity. This may be the picture of deposits in Swiss banks only. What about other international banks?

Black money in Swiss banks — Swiss Banking Association report, 2006 details bank deposits in the territory of Switzerland by nationals of following countries:

Top five
India—- $1,456 billion
Russia —$ 470 billion
UK ——-$390 billion
Ukraine - $100 billion
China —–$ 96 billion

Now do the maths - India with $1456 billion or $1.4 trillion has more money in Swiss banks than rest of the world combined. Public loot since 1947:

Can we bring back our money? It is one of the biggest loots witnessed by mankind — the loot of the Aam Aadmi (common man) since 1947, by his brethren occupying public office. It has been orchestrated by politicians, bureaucrats and some businessmen.

The list is almost all-encompassing. No wonder, everyone in India loots with impunity and without any fear.

What is even more depressing in that this ill-gotten wealth of ours has been stashed away abroad into secret bank accounts located in some of the world’s best known tax havens. And to that extent the Indian economy has been stripped of its wealth.

Ordinary Indians may not be exactly aware of how such secret accounts operate and what are the rules and regulations that go on to govern such tax havens. However, one may well be aware of ‘Swiss bank accounts,’ the shorthand for murky dealings, secrecy and of course pilferage from developing countries into rich developed ones.

In fact, some finance experts and economists believe tax havens to be a conspiracy of the western world against the poor countries. By allowing the proliferation of tax havens in the twentieth century, the western world explicitly encourages the movement of scarce capital from the developing countries to the rich.

In March 2005, the Tax Justice Network (TJN) published a research finding demonstrating that $11.5 trillion of personal wealth was held offshore by rich individuals across the globe.

The findings estimated that a large proportion of this wealth was managed from some 70 tax havens.
Further,augmenting these studies of TJN, Raymond Baker — in his widely celebrated book titled ‘Capitalism’ s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free Market System’ — estimates that at least $5 trillion have been shifted out of poorer countries to the West since the mid-1970.

It is further estimated by experts that one per cent of the world’s population holds more than 57 per cent of total global wealth, routing it invariably through these tax havens. How much of this is from India is anybody’s guess.

What is to be noted here is that most of the wealth of Indians parked in these tax havens is illegitimate money acquired through corrupt means.

Naturally, the secrecy associated with the bank accounts in such places is central to the issue, not their low tax rates as the term ‘tax havens’ suggests. Remember Bofors and how India could not trace the ultimate beneficiary of those transactions because of the secrecy associated with
these bank accounts?

Indian market has to grow in a balanced manner'

Mumbai, Aug. 21 -- Swiss believes India is a large market of affluent people who can buy first class services, said Holger Hatty, its chief commercial officer, in an interview. Excerpts. On the Indian market India is high on our agenda. Hence we are introducing first class here. India is a large market of affluent people who can buy first class. We want to be the best premium European carrier from India. The market witnessed too much competition and airlines built too much capacity. This market was very much regulated and once it opened up, it opened suddenly. The market has to grow in a balanced manner. On its offering Our first class would be the main differentiator. We are targeting top businessmen, high net worth individuals and bollywood personalities. We are replacing the 10-year old business class with ultra modern facilities. Our premium positioning would help us earn more revenue from other classes. On difficult times People do tighten their purse strings in difficult times but one should not divert from ones strategy. We are a premium carrier. We are convinced that in the long-term, first-class products will excel. There can't be Swiss without the premium first class.