UBS closing U.S. clients' offshore accounts -NYT

UBS closing U.S. clients' offshore accounts -NYT

uk.reuters.com

UBS, which the U.S. authorities says helped wealthy Americans hide cash in offshore bank accounts, will shut about 19,000 offshore accounts, the paper said, quoting unnamed U.S. clients.

The Swiss bank, one of the hardest-hit in the credit crisis, decided in July last year to stop offering offshore accounts to U.S. citizens after it was targeted by the U.S. tax investigation which challenges Switzerland's famous banking secrecy laws.

(visit the link for the full news article)

So, no more secrecy in banking anymore?

It looks as though all those very wealthy people will not be able to hide their money in Swiss banks anymore.

U.S. prosecutors have alleged that UBS helped clients hide $18 billion of untaxed American money in undeclared accounts. This amounts to around $300 million of annual unpaid taxes, the newspaper said. UBS will transfer the U.S. clients' assets to other banks or other divisions within UBS, or will mail checks directly to the account holders, creating paper trails for U.S. federal prosecutors who are checking whether UBS clients used such accounts to evade taxes.

What is interesting about this - is the very wealthy will not be put in jail for tax evasion:

In a separate article, the Wall Street Journal said on Friday that many U.S. clients of UBS had started to voluntarily turn themselves in to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The clients have so far avoided serious punishment, the paper said.

But if any of us "regular" people tried to hide our money tax free - we would be put in jail.

I wonder if they will ever release the names of those people who have hidden their money? If so, I also wonder how many "high profile" government officals, business people, celebrities etc would be on the list?



uk.reuters.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

People want to hide it because banks are failing and the stock market has tanked. Everyone ran to Treasuries for safety and now supposedly they might be a bubble too. Then this crack down. What's next, Gold? Who can deny that there is a concerted effort to divest U.S. citizens of our money?

I guess now the drug money laundering of the politically connected will finally see the light of public scrutiny, which will of course tank the markets even more.

Private / offshore bank accounts are big bucks for the governments.. though many countries in the EU (liechtenstein, switzerland etc) are strictening their banking secrecy laws, other countries such as singapore still maintain their bank secrecy, offshore banking in singapore is booming nowadays!