Bradley Birkenfeld

Second Florida Yachting Exec Charged In UBS Tax Shelter Probe

Moe Tkacik | April 15, 2009, 12:07PM

Another rich client of UBS has been charged with using Swiss banking secrecy laws to evade taxes: it's Robert Moran, who failed to declare a $3.7 million account with the bank on his 2007 tax return.

Like Steven Michael Rubinstein, who earlier this month became the first UBS client charged in the investigation, Moran is a Florida yacht dealer charged with a single count of tax fraud. The Times specifies that the two are "not connected" except inasmuch as theirs were two of the 285 names the ailing Swiss bank, which today announced it would cut another 7,500 jobs after posting a $1.8 billion loss, handed over to the IRS earlier this year as part of a $780 million settlement into its tax evasion business.

Yachts were a "fertile recruiting ground" for UBS, according to Bradley Birkenfeld, the former UBS private banker whose "statement of facts" in the criminal probe of his role in the bank's tax evasion business provided the basis for much of the larger investigation. And Moran is a resident of Lighthouse Point, Florida -- also an address used by Birkenfeld's most famous client Igor Olenicoff, the billionaire real estate developer for whom Birkenfeld once laundered cash by traveling to the United States with a toothpaste tube full of diamonds. Birkenfeld's statement confesses to "numerous overt acts [of tax fraud] in Broward County," where both Rubinstein and Moran reside. Both men appear to be cooperating in the investigation.

So who boarded those fancy yachts, one of which can be chartered for the reasonable price of a million dollars a week plus expenses?

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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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