Meet the Three Swiss Stooges. Michael Berlinka, Urs Frei and Roger Keller — bankers for Switzerland’s oldest private bank, Wegelin & Co. — were indicted yesterday by Manhattan federal prosecutors for conspiring with wealthy US tax cheats to hide some $1.2 billion in assets.
What makes the scheme so harebrained is that it was allegedly triggered by news that the IRS was investigating Swiss banking giant UBS for also helping tax cheats.
Prosecutors said that the three bankers viewed news of the UBS investigation as the perfect ploy to attract new US clients. The bankers told worried US tax cheats that they were “less vulnerable to United States law enforcement pressure” because, unlike rival UBS, Wegelin had no offices outside Switzerland.
In describing the scheme to Wegelin personnel, one top exec, who was not named in the indictment but labeled a co-conspirator, assured Wegelin staffers that the bank “was not exposed to the risk of prosecution that UBS faced because [it] was smaller than UBS.” The unnamed executive also told staffers that Wegelin could charge high fees to clients fleeing UBS and other banks targeted by the US crackdown specifically because they were so “afraid of prosecution.”
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/swiss_bankers_had_fondue_for_brains_15BxiZwjUuO1TaHyMY7nOP#ixzz1iTdpQlfE
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