The end of Swiss banking secrecy?
Cuckoo clocks, cowbells and inviolable banking secrecy… that’s Switzerland. Except it’s changing.
A story that’s crept off the financial pages into the headlines says that the Swiss bank UBS may be forced to reveal to the US authorities the names of up to 52,000 US citizens who allegedly have been evading taxes by putting their money and other assets in Swiss coffers.
Read the explosive testimony of the whistleblower, who told a US court that he had been sent to America by UBS to advise wealthy clients on how to avoid US tax. Amazing!
According to The New York Times, a 2004 memo shows how the banking giant UBS “created hundreds of ‘dummy’ offshore corporations where its clients could hide money from the IRS”.
It continues:
“An email message sent that year captured some of the coded language used by UBS bankers. In their world, “one nut” meant $250,000, while “one swan” meant $1 million. Colors were used to designate certain currencies. Orange, for example, represented the euro; blue, the British pound.”
More juicy details are on the US department of Justice website.
I remember being blocked when trying to trace the Swiss bank accounts where dictators Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines had squirrelled away their ill-gotten gains. A Swiss bank once threatened us with legal action for publishing documents about those assets.
So if this is the beginning of the end of Swiss banking secrecy, that sounds like great news for taxpayers and journalists, and very bad news for corrupt dictators.
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