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Clintons and the Sordid (at best) UBS Deal:
March 10, 2016, 06:00 am
The Clintons and the sordid UBS affair
By Ernest A. Canning
The story, as originally recounted by James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus of The Wall Street Journal, was, of itself, deeply troubling. In March 2009, after meeting with Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on behalf of Switzerland's most powerful banking institution, UBS. The IRS, which at that time was seeking the identity of wealthy Americans who had stashed some $20 billion in 52,000 tax evading UBS accounts, then agreed that the Swiss bank need only turn over information on 4,450 accounts. Afterwards, UBS increased its previous $60,000 in donations to the Clinton Foundation ten-fold. By the end of 2014, UBS donations to the Clinton Foundation totaled $600,000. UBS also "paid former President Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House."
Those facts, of themselves, raise disturbing questions. Did a bank that still ranks as "the world's biggest wealth manager" and has at its disposal a bevy of economists and law firms have a legitimate reason for paying Bill Clinton $1.5 million in speaking fees? Or was the $1.5 million and the tenfold increase in Clinton Foundation donations a reward for the former secretary of State's intervention? If the latter, that reward would have, under federal law (18 U.S.C. § 201(c)(1)(A)), amounted to an illicit bribe.
snpi
The DoJ alleges that UBS did much more than permit wealthy Americans to stash billions in tax evading offshore accounts. In direct violation of a 2000 agreement with the IRS, Swiss bankers traveled to the U.S. 3,800 times to foster the elicit business and "used encrypted laptops and other counter-surveillance techniques to help prevent the detection of their marketing efforts and the identities and offshore assets of their U.S. clients."
"UBS executives knew that UBS's cross-border business violated the law," said R. Alexander Acosta, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. "They refused to stop this activity...and in fact instructed their bankers to grow the business. The reason was money -- the business was too profitable to give up. This was not mere compliance oversight, but rather a knowing crime motivated by greed and disrespect for the law."
snip
When UBS, which could have lost its ability to conduct business in the U.S. if successfully prosecuted, balked at the IRS demand that it turn over information for all 52,000 accounts, the IRS filed a legal action seeking to compel disclosure. That is when, at the behest of the Swiss government, Hillary Clinton stepped in to negotiate a deal that prevented the IRS from gaining access to more than 91 percent of the illicit, tax-evading offshore accounts.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/presidential-campaign/272396-the-clintons-and-the-sordid-ubs-affairt
The Clintons and the sordid UBS affair
By Ernest A. Canning
The story, as originally recounted by James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus of The Wall Street Journal, was, of itself, deeply troubling. In March 2009, after meeting with Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on behalf of Switzerland's most powerful banking institution, UBS. The IRS, which at that time was seeking the identity of wealthy Americans who had stashed some $20 billion in 52,000 tax evading UBS accounts, then agreed that the Swiss bank need only turn over information on 4,450 accounts. Afterwards, UBS increased its previous $60,000 in donations to the Clinton Foundation ten-fold. By the end of 2014, UBS donations to the Clinton Foundation totaled $600,000. UBS also "paid former President Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House."
Those facts, of themselves, raise disturbing questions. Did a bank that still ranks as "the world's biggest wealth manager" and has at its disposal a bevy of economists and law firms have a legitimate reason for paying Bill Clinton $1.5 million in speaking fees? Or was the $1.5 million and the tenfold increase in Clinton Foundation donations a reward for the former secretary of State's intervention? If the latter, that reward would have, under federal law (18 U.S.C. § 201(c)(1)(A)), amounted to an illicit bribe.
snpi
The DoJ alleges that UBS did much more than permit wealthy Americans to stash billions in tax evading offshore accounts. In direct violation of a 2000 agreement with the IRS, Swiss bankers traveled to the U.S. 3,800 times to foster the elicit business and "used encrypted laptops and other counter-surveillance techniques to help prevent the detection of their marketing efforts and the identities and offshore assets of their U.S. clients."
"UBS executives knew that UBS's cross-border business violated the law," said R. Alexander Acosta, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. "They refused to stop this activity...and in fact instructed their bankers to grow the business. The reason was money -- the business was too profitable to give up. This was not mere compliance oversight, but rather a knowing crime motivated by greed and disrespect for the law."
snip
When UBS, which could have lost its ability to conduct business in the U.S. if successfully prosecuted, balked at the IRS demand that it turn over information for all 52,000 accounts, the IRS filed a legal action seeking to compel disclosure. That is when, at the behest of the Swiss government, Hillary Clinton stepped in to negotiate a deal that prevented the IRS from gaining access to more than 91 percent of the illicit, tax-evading offshore accounts.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/presidential-campaign/272396-the-clintons-and-the-sordid-ubs-affairt
8 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
UBS is a Swiss bank that is enjoying better days, thanks to the US taxpayer and a number of key US political leaders.
Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons
The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.
by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, The Atlantic, JUL 31, 2015
The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.
The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.
“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”
Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”
The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.” Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.
SNIP...
As McClatchy noted last month in a more broadly focused article that also mentions UBS, “Ten of the world’s biggest financial institutions––including UBS, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs––have hired Bill Clinton numerous times since 2004 to speak for fees totaling more than $6.4 million. Hillary Clinton also has accepted speaking fees from at least one bank. And along with an 11th bank, the French giant BNP Paribas, the financial goliaths also donated as much as $24.9 million to the Clinton Foundation––the family’s global charity set up to tackle causes from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to climate change.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/
About UBS Wealth Management
It's Buy Partisan
After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm found a job at Swiss bank UBS as vice chairman. He later brought on former President Bill Clinton. What a coincidence, they are the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagal. Since the New Deal it was the financial regulation that protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino. Oh well, what's a $16 trillion bailout among friends?
It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:
President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool
SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html
One of my attorney chums doesn't like to see his name on any committees, event letterhead or political campaign literature. These folks, it seems to me, are past caring.
Some of why DUers and ALL voters should care about Phil Gramm.
Until recently, the nation's "news media" hasn't really followed the UBS story. Thank you for the heads-up, amborin!
Like permanent wars and a fiscal policy fixed to further enrich the already rich, America's foreign policy works to benefit the connected crony class at the expense of the nation as a whole. That is most un-democratic and, in the days before the figurehead of greed Ronnie Reagan assumed office thanks to Poppy Bush, Bill Casey and their chum, the Ayatollah, most un-American.
You brought a tear to my eye today, amborin. The truth matters and sharing it really matters.
/s 
