#swissbanking

[investmentees]

UBS Letter of Undertaking to Credit Suisse has both Bold Holders and Shareholders seeing red. With $4B basically wiped out over a single weekend, wouldn’t you be?

[investmentees]

Offshore: Elmer and the Swiss Bank Secrecy (2016) Ever been curious about the Swiss Banking System & the role it plays in the offshore financial transactions? All the secrets are revealed in this one…


[mellowyknox]

Swissbanking "Danke"

Agency: SF Leo Burnett Zurich

Production: Condor Films Zurich Director: Max Vitali Cinematographer: Mattias Rudh Editor: Mischa Meyer

Year: 2013

[lawofsecrecy]

Leaked Files Expose Global Banking Giant HSBC

The global banking industry was dropped with a bombshell over the weekend when an independent journalism organization obtained leaked documents and issued a report that exposed intimate details of HSBC's secretive Swiss branch.  From the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists:

Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.

The documents, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists via the French newspaper Le Monde, show the bank’s dealings with clients engaged in a spectrum of illegal behavior, especially in hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from tax authorities. They also show private records of famed soccer and tennis players, cyclists, rock stars, Hollywood actors, royalty, politicians, corporate executives and old-wealth families. 

The highlights of the report include:

- HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) continued to offer services to clients who had been unfavorably named by the United Nations, in court documents and in the media as connected to arms trafficking, blood diamonds and bribery.

- HSBC served those close to discredited regimes such as that of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, former Tunisian president Ben Ali and current Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad.

- Clients who held HSBC bank accounts in Switzerland include former and current politicians from Britain, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kenya, Romania, India, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Lebanon, Tunisia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Paraguay, Djibouti, Senegal, Philippines and Algeria.

- The bank repeatedly reassured clients that it would not disclose details of accounts to national authorities, even if evidence suggested that the accounts were undeclared to tax authorities in the client’s home country. Bank employees also discussed with clients a range of measures that would ultimately allow clients to avoid paying taxes in their home countries. This included holding accounts in the name of offshore companies to avoid the European Savings Directive, a 2005 Europe-wide rule aimed at tackling tax evasion through the exchange of bank information.

-NB

[lawofsecrecy]

Pursued By DOJ, Swiss Banking Clients On the Move To Elite Micro City-State

Analogize the behaviors by the wealthy to whatever arthropod you prefer, the move to Monaco signals a trend of what we can expect to see if the DOJ continues their aggressive campaign against tax evaders; an expensive game of cat and mouse.  Bloomberg described in an online article the allure Monaco has to the uber-wealthy:

Monaco, the tax haven on the French Riviera, is experiencing a luxury-housing boom that includes the world’s most expensive penthouse as developers prepare for an influx of millionaires and billionaires escaping higher taxes or a loss of banking privacy.

A “flow” of new residents is emigrating from Switzerland, where financial-secrecy laws are crumbling, said Jean Claude Caputo, managing director of broker Savills Plc’s French Riviera unit. They’re drawn by the principality’s “security, sophistication and climate,” he said — as well as for financial reasons. The Swiss government signed an accord in May to automatically share bank data across borders.

“High-net-worth individuals want to be in this part of the world,” Caputo said as he drove in his Audi Quattro to Monaco to brief Swiss private bankers on the property market there and help them advise clients considering a move.

New levies on luxury homes in London and a U.S.-led global crackdown on hiding assets will also probably attract the affluent to Monaco, which already counts pop stars, Formula One drivers and Russian billionaires among its inhabitants. One in three of Monaco’s 38,000 residents are millionaires, according to a study by Spear’s magazine and WealthInsight.