UBS

Rich People Sobbing In Fear As UBS Bars Swiss Bankers From Leaving The Country

Moe Tkacik | April 8, 2009, 2:51PM

Steven Michael Rubinstein, the Art Basel-going yacht builder's accountant from Boca Raton who last week became first American prosecuted in a sweeping probe of tax shelters since the Swiss government ordered the bank to hand over the names of some 300 of its clients to the IRS, was released today on $12 million bail, the latest development in the intensifying probe of tax shelters. But not everyone involved in the investigation of what UBS itself called a "scheme to defraud the American government" is enjoying freedom of movement: also today the Wall Street Journal reports the bank has barred its "client facing" bankers from traveling overseas -- a move "aimed at avoiding further trouble" of the sort UBS bankers like Brad Birkenfeld flirted in the good old days before the crackdown:

Brad Birkenfeld was a frequent trans-­Atlantic flier. He lived and worked in Switzerland, dividing his time between an apartment in Geneva and a house in Zermatt, an Alpine village at the base of the Matterhorn. But his biggest client was in California, and however grueling the trip through nine time zones was, it was worth it...He was willing to go the extra mile for his clients, so he didn't blink when one of them asked him to do something that was blatantly illegal by any country's standard: Buy diamonds with secret Swiss funds and bring them into the U.S. undeclared and undetected.To get them into the country, Birkenfeld had only one option. He had to smuggle them in...So Brad Birkenfeld, a banker at one of the most prestigious institutions in global finance, began jamming his clients' loose diamonds into a tube of toothpaste.

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