Swiss bank giant UBS is being investigated over money laundering and serious organised tax fraud in

[dixiegrrrrl]

A statement from prosecutors said: "The Swiss bank is suspected of having directly, and not via its Belgian subsidiary, approached Belgian clients to convince them to set up constructions aimed at evading taxes."

UBS said it would "defend itself against any unfounded allegations".

It is the latest in a series of probes into malpractice by banks.

The prosecutors' statement said the judicial investigation came after "excellent" help from French authorities, who had been looking at allegations that UBS had been encouraging clients to open accounts in Switzerland to avoid tax between the years 2004-12.

The US has also been looking into whether the bank allowed its US customers to hide their wealth from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to avoid paying full tax.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35666994

[Trailrider1951]

1. But but but don't ya know they're revitalizing America?

http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/PresidentGeorgeWBush.html

http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/PresidentWilliamJClinton.html


To paraphrase the late, great George Carlin:

"It's a big club and we ain't in it."


A tip o' the hat to Octafish who posted this link a while back.

[Octafish]

4. President Obama golfed with the then-head of UBS America...

Nothing against BHO, bankers or the people at UBS. It's just a matter of the power of money. It doesn't work so well for democracy in the USA or the planet when most of it is concentrated in a few thousand pockets.

THE GAME THAT GOES ON AND ON:
A SWISS BANK, A PRESIDENT, AND THE PERMANENT GOVERNMENT

By RUSS BAKER
Published: April 21, 2010

EXCERPT...

When most people criticize those aspects of government that seem most impervious to the democratic process, they cite the permanency and perceived self-interest of the mandarins of the Washington bureaucracy. But when it comes to real power, an ability to come out ahead no matter which party is in power, it’s hard to top certain financial institutions.

UBS is very much a part of that permanent government. Though not a household name in the United States, UBS is a major player in the Beltway game. During the 2008 campaign, while Robert Wolf was courting Democratic hopeful Obama, his UBS cohort, former Senator Phil Gramm, was working the other side of the street. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in the 1990s, Gramm, a corporate-friendly Texas Republican, played a key role in the deregulation of the banking industry, an act so central to the nation’s financial collapse. Since 2002, Gramm has been UBS Americas’ vice chairman. In 2008, he was the leading economics adviser for Obama’s opponent, John McCain—and even touted as a possible treasury secretary in a McCain administration.

The bottom line: UBS hedged its bets, and so had an inside track no matter which party took the White House. Thus, when Obama won, it was Wolf who ascended. The new president named the banker-donor to his White House Economic Advisory Board.

The important machinations behind this accrual of influence rarely get attention in the frenzied hustle of the news cycle. One reason is that they do not seem like news at all, since they are essentially woven deeply into the fabric of politics and government, thus hidden in plain sight. Another is that they are dauntingly complex.

SNIP...

In any case, it has become increasingly clear that tax evasion is but a piece of a troubling larger picture. The states of New York, Texas and Massachusetts sued the bank in 2008, accusing it of misleading investors about risks in its auction-rate securities market. UBS executives dumped their own holdings when the supposedly safe investments took a nosedive, yet continued to recommend them to customers. In Puerto Rico, a Bloomberg News reporter found, UBS had created its own closed-loop system for generating profits —it advised the Commonwealth to issue bonds, marketed the bonds to investors through UBS mutual funds, and then loaned the mutual funds money so they could buy the bonds. As James Cox, a Duke law professor and expert on finance and law said at the time, “I’ve never seen such a blatant series of conflicts of interest.”

CONTINUED...

ARCHIVE: https://web.archive.org/web/20100914233705/http://www.whowhatwhy.com/the-game-that-goes-on-and-on.html

http://whowhatwhy.org/2010/04/21/the-game-that-goes-on-and-on-a-swiss-bank-a-president-and-the-permanent-government/

http://whowhatwhy.com/the-game-that-goes-on-and-on.html

PS: Thank you for remembering, Trailrider1951. It means the world to me.

[Octafish]

2. UBS hired Phil Gramm.

Phil Gramm in my book is the Meyer Lansky of the War Party.

The guy helped drive the Banksters' getaway car in 2008. And no one in authority has had the guts to ask him to put it back.

[malaise]

3. Why?

[Octafish]

5. Because the authorities decided to make bank robbery legal.

Seeing how the US Taxpayer just happened to be there to pick up the tab and all.

Zero Prosecutions Aren’t Few Enough – Wall Street Wants SEC Sanctions Reduced to DMV Points

By William K. Black
Kilkenny, Ireland: November 8, 2014

Wall Street’s full depravity was put on display in Joseph Fichera’s November 6, 2014 op ed in the New York Times. I hasten to add that the reason that the op ed is so revealing is that Fichera is one of the sometimes good guys who, for example, accurately warned that “auction-rate securities” were a dangerous scam and criticized JPMorgan’s odious abuse of Denver. When the Ficheras of the world join in Wall Street’s “race to the bottom” Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s President Dudley’s point about the corrupt culture that characterizes Wall Street is proven irrefutably.

Let’s begin by reviewing the bidding. We have just suffered through the third economic crisis driven by epidemics of control fraud. In two of the crises the financial industry led the fraud epidemics. In the Enron-era fraud epidemic they eagerly aided and abetted Enron’s frauds. In the current crisis we know that U.S. government investigators have found that 16 of the largest banks in the world conspired to falsify Libor, which is used to price $350 trillion in assets. This is the largest cartel in world history by at least three orders of magnitude. Note that all 16 of the banks that participate in creating Libor falsified their statements for the express purpose of falsifying the Libor “fix.” There were no honest banks and there is no reason to believe that if 25 banks participated in setting Libor the results would have differed. The conspirators are not known to have blackballed any bank from participating in “fixing” Libor because of fears that the blackballed bank was led by an honest CEO who would expose and end the conspiracy.

Government investigators have found that over 20 of the largest banks defrauded Fannie and Freddie by selling them vast amount of toxic mortgages through fraudulent “reps and warranties.” Government investigators have found that over 20 of the largest banks defrauded a series of credit unions by selling them toxic mortgages and toxic mortgage derivatives through fraudulent reps and warranties. Government investigators have found other wide ranging frauds by the large banks to (1) rig bids for issuing municipal securities, (2) to foreclose on people through fraudulent affidavits, and (3) by conspiring to falsify foreign exchange (FX) rates. In sum, the leaders of the largest banks in the world are overwhelmingly leading criminal enterprises that commit financial frauds of unprecedented scope and damage. The resulting financial crisis caused by the three most destructive fraud epidemics in history caused over a $21 trillion loss in U.S. GDP and the loss of over 10 million American jobs. Each of those figures is much larger in Europe.

Worse, no senior banker who led the three fraud epidemics has been prosecuted in the U.S. for those crimes. Virtually no senior bankers who led the three fraud epidemics has even been the subject of a civil suit by the U.S. Virtually no senior banker in the U.S. has had his fraud proceeds “clawed back” by the government or the bank. The senior bankers were made wealthy through the “sure thing” of accounting control fraud – with nearly perfect impunity from the criminal and civil law.

This is the setting in which Fichera writes. As a sometimes good guy, one would expect his column to call for the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the SEC to end this impunity and immediately act vigorously to hold the senior bankers personally accountable for leading the frauds that blew up the global economy. Instead, Fichera wrote to urge (1) that the largest banks be treated as “too big to jail,” (2) to decry the “tendency to vilify all Wall Street firms as unscrupulous,” (3) to urge SEC sanctions to be reduced to the level of “DMV” “points,” and (4) to provide that no matter how egregious the fraud the SEC would have no power to remove a Wall Street firm’s license until it committed “multiple” cases of the equivalent of deliberate homicide in which each case could involve deliberately running over millions of investors. Under Fichera’s plan, every dog would get at least one bite – of every investor – which would mean hundreds of thousands of bites. Fichera wants banks to be – officially – entitled to commit securities fraud without effective sanction from the SEC.

CONTINUED...

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/11/zero-prosecutions-arent-enough-wall-street-wants-sec-sanctions-reduced-dmv-points.html#more-8811

When Iceland was clobbered by the banksters in 2008, they called William K. Black. He helped them put 70 or 80 banksters behind bars.

He knew what to look for. In the USA, he helped investigate and prosecute the crooked S&L directors in the 1980s and 90s.

I wonder why no one called him during the Great Bank Looting of 2008?

[malaise]

6. Nothing will make America great again

until the thieving bankers are in prison.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. When yu are an ex-politico, you get rewarded by a "job" at one of the banks

and/or huge speaking fees, maybe write a book, for sure sit on a few boards, which pay a nice hunk of money for 3-4 hours a month sitting in a meeting..whatever excuse to collect your payoff for getting that helpful legislation thru when you were in office.

[malaise]

8. Across the globe the entire system needs fundamental

reform - people have to be sent to prison

[HereSince1628]

9. UBS increased donations to Clinton Fndn after Hillary helped with IRS

http://nypost.com/2015/07/30/ubs-increased-donations-to-clinton-foundation-after-hillarys-help-with-irs/

[dixiegrrrrl]

10. Sigh.....but of course......sigh. n/t