UBS Whisleblower

[willriker]

there is a major diferance between reporting a crime you witnessed and reporting a crime you took part in.

you cant be held liable for not helping someone drowning, but if you took some part in drowning the person... your fucked.

[Khajit]

The US did not touch the industry itself. The Swedish banks were breaking the Banking laws and regulations by coming to the US and doing their "banking" under the table here.

You analogy with Chinese/US law is different. You should think of it as going to China, breaking Chinese laws or financial regulations, and coming back to the US. Now if you had billions of dollars involved in the Chinese economy, you would not want to completely back out of the scene... you would rather pay their demanded fines and move on. (The alternative would be to face their crimes and end up losing your involvement in their money all together)

From what I understand the Swedish Bank did the same thing. To protect their current and future clients, they simply paid the penalties, settling out of court, and everyone moves. Meanwhile the bank will continue to lose clients from this point on.

Ok that makes a bit more sense. I'd assumed that since I'd read (from a book by the author of "the game" whom was attempting to get an international account) that Swiss banks currently refuse to accept American clients nowadays unless physically in the country due to tax laws making their secrecy illegal in the USA so I assumed that the physical acts happened in Switzerland.
So my view of it was more like going to the US, breaking Chinese laws(like not being perfect during the Olympics) then getting prosecuted and arrested for breaking Chinese law as well as any Americans that were involved with you.

Oh and to the part about him not having immunity against his own crimes.
A group has killed hundreds/thousands of people and is still killing.(since you too the analogy to murder I'll continue along that analogy) If an accomplice offered up info on them in exchange for immunity that would lead to the prosecution of 19,000 serial murderers aka several battalions of mafia hitmen (really at that scale it's more like a small army that your country is fighting a war against) do you think they would blink for a second about letting the snitch go off scott free?
Not even that but it's broken logic all the way through.
He turns in people in exchange for immunity but isn't immune from crimes he committed?
By the very nature of his involvement he technically committed ALL of the crimes in order to know they existed so if that was true he wouldn't be able to get immunity in the first place.
Don't get me wrong I think that if he did skimm out his personal money laundering it makes him an idiot for not simply making sure he couldn't get any jail time ahead of time and revealing his crimes too. The worst he'd have to do with proper negotiations is pay back what he personally hid from the IRS with a scoop from his brand new Scrooge McDuck money bin. It seems either amazingly stupid of him to not manage to get the blatantly obvious jail free route or douchey of the IRS to smack him in jail after getting him to believe that he was giving out this info(of his own volition no less instead of being caught first and brokering a deal?) so that he wouldn't have to go to jail.

[sephir]

Well the reason why the bank was hit with the fine was because they were sending Swiss bankers to events sponsored by the bank in order to drum up new clients in the US - which is in violation of US banking laws. Personally I think this guy should get off scott free and be given a large compensation for coming forward, this will encourage future people to come forward and bring in even more owed tax dollars to the US government.

Also, when it comes to whistleblowers. It is very rare for there to be any boy scouts, the vast majority all had their hand in the cookie jar at one point or another and it should be expected that they did. He should not have been charged, and if he is sent to jail and is not compensated it will be very unlikely to ever see another whistleblower come forward. Especially one bringing in nearly $19Billion in lost revenue to the US treasury.

[Kuya]

According to this source, the guy had been trying to tell authorities what had been going on, but he kept getting shut out.

STEPHEN KOHN: Well, the prosecutor before the court said Mr. Birkenfeld was going to jail because he failed to disclose in 2007 his relationship with this billionaire, Mr. Olenicoff. Our investigation has shown that statement was not true.

When Birkenfeld met with the Justice Department, he begged them for a subpoena, or other compulsory service, to reveal names of clients, which was illegal under Swiss law. He was living in Switzerland at the time. They wouldn’t. So Mr. Birkenfeld went and asked the Senate Committee on Investigations to subpoena him. They did. Two days after getting that subpoena, in a sworn deposition, he revealed all his information about Mr. Olenicoff onto the record. That was all done in 2007, before Olenicoff was indicted and before he entered any plea. If there was any conspiracy to hold—to hide information about Olenicoff, it was from the Justice Department, that wouldn’t give Mr. Birkenfeld the process he needed to comply with Swiss law. And it was very simple for them to do that. Once he got it, he turned over all the names. He did it before the indictment. So then the prosecutor, to sentence Mr. Birkenfeld to forty months in jail, appears in court and accuses Birkenfeld of withholding Olenicoff, which was not true.

What’s triple outrageous—I’m going beyond double—is that then they recommend thirty months imprisonment for Birkenfeld. He gets forty months, more than probably every single tax cheat, the 19,000 of them that he turned in, will get collectively. Olenicoff, the billionaire, who for twenty years was hiding millions and millions of dollars willfully, got probation. A guy named Liechti, who was Birkenfeld’s third line supervisor in the Swiss bank, who was in charge of all the illegal accounts, who was detained and arrested by the Justice Department, was released and let to go back to Switzerland with no prison time or even a conviction, whereas Birkenfeld, who blew the whistle on the whole scheme voluntarily, is going to serve more time in prison than the worst of the wrongdoers that were involved in holding back $20 billion in illegal accounts.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Stephen Kohn, I interviewed you at length earlier this week and wrote a column in the Daily News about this case, and I was astounded, as you presented the documents that you have accumulated, your client has accumulated over the years, for over how long a period Bradley Birkenfeld actually tried to get anybody to listen to what he believed was the illegal activity involved here. He first, for a period of more than a year, tried to get his own bank to investigate the situation, finally resigning. Then he goes not only to the Justice Department; he went to the IRS, he went to the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as—as well as the Senate Investigations Committee. So it appears that he was actually trying to say, “Hey, this is a major, major international fraud operating here that I was involved in,” but the government—until the Senate committee got involved, apparently no one wanted to listen.

STEPHEN KOHN: Well, what happened was—you’re 100 percent right. The record shows he went to—he was a typical whistleblower. When he read a document, that triggered, and he realized what he was doing was illegal—and even some of it illegal under Swiss law, by the way—he went to his supervisor. And as he tells it, he almost had a fistfight. I mean, they had an argument. That’s typical. He then went to internal compliance. He went to the lawyers. He wrote emails. He then filed an official whistleblower complaint within UBS, all of which was covered up.

He then travels to America. Big mistake. He went to the Justice Department criminal lawyers who do tax fraud. Those folks looked at him as an easy mark. Here’s a guy walking in the door who is giving you information about a massive tax fraud, voluntarily, without immunity. They said, “Oh, we’ll just go throw this guy in jail.” So that’s why they wouldn’t subpoena him or give him immunity or do things necessary to get all the information, because they wanted to get him from the start. It’s clear.

Now, Birkenfeld was a whistleblower. When he detected this hostility from Justice—and, by the way, he met with them for two full days and turned over all the information about the bank. But he detected that hostility, so he instructed his lawyers, and they reached out separately to the Securities Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the Senate. And at his own expense—he’s living in Switzerland—he voluntarily flies to the United States and meets with these other groups and makes major disclosures, the same disclosures that he made to the Justice Department about UBS, but also disclosures about the clients.

What’s good about the Senate disclosure is they had a court reporter who took it down. No one can deny it. It has the date. It has the statements. So as the Justice Department has attempted to mislead the public about what Mr. Birkenfeld did and when he did it, there’s a transcript that proves Birkenfeld right.

The source alleges that the Justice department is wrong, and there is evidence to the contrary of what the Justice dep is claiming.