Grand juries have indicted dozens of American clients of Swiss banking giant UBS AG for enabling tax evasion by Americans by hiding their wealth.
Amir Zavieh, a naturalized US citizen, was charged last Tuesday with fraud and conspiracy by federal prosecutors in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The charges against Zavieh, a San Francisco resident who also goes by the first name Allen, refer to his accounts at UBS and another Swiss bank.
A Justice Department statement said Zavieh lied to US investigators and “fabricated a false story about the ownership of the assets in the secret Swiss accounts at UBS and Cantonal Bank in order to conceal the defendant’s ownership and con- trol of assets and income” from the US Internal Revenue Service.
The statement said Zavieh “made false statements to federal law enforcement agents regarding his ownership and control of the secret Swiss accounts,” saying at one point that the account actually belonged to relatives in Iran.
If convicted, Zavieh faces up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000. The charges come amid a broad crackdown on tax evasion by the wealthy.
US authorities—suspecting that tens of thousands of Americans are hiding behind Swiss banking secrecy laws to avoid paying taxes—are investigating scores of Swiss banks and international banks with Swiss operations.
The investigations are reportedly focused on UBS, Credit Suisse AG, HSBC Holdings Plc and Basler Kantonal bank, among others.
In 2009, UBS paid $780 million to settle Justice Department criminal charges that the bank helped thousands of US clients hide $20 billion in their accounts.
Swiss authorities want a global civil settlement with the United States in which the entire Swiss banking industry would pay a fine and end their undisclosed private banking services for Americans.
The Zavieh indictment was Californian Darvish seeks to move to charged with an American baseball team dodging taxes J A aided by cooperation provided by Renzo Gadola, a former senior UBS private banker, who handled Zavieh’s account.
Gadola, who worked at UBS from 1995 to 2008, last month received five months’ probation from a Florida federal judge after being charged with conspiracy. Gadola has cooperated extensively with US law enforcement conducting a wide- ranging criminal investigation of Swiss banks.
He disclosed to federal prosecutors for the first time the role of Swiss cantonal banks, including Basler Kantonalbank (BKB), in helping Americans evade US taxes. His cooperation continues as part of his probation.
According to the indictment, Zavieh opened a secret ac- count with UBS in 1989 and moved that account to the cantonal bank in 2008 after Gadola warned him the UBS account was in danger of being revealed to the IRS.
In a June 2010 email cited in the indictment, Zavieh told Gadola, “At some point IF they come after me, I will fight it tooth and nail.”
UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, handed over information on more than 4.700 American holders of secret bank accounts to the IRS in 2009 as part of a settlement of criminal and civil cases against the bank.
Zavieh is the latest of about 40 American taxpayers charged with using Swiss banks to hide taxable funds. Gadola is one of 21 bankers, lawyers and others charged with helping the evasion.
According to the indictment, Zavieh’s UBS account had year-end balances exceeding $900,000 in every year from 1999 through 2008. Over that period he annually earned in excess of $30,000 in interest in- come that was never reported to the IRS. The indictment said he didn’t even file any tax returns from 1998 through 2006 and again in 2008.
Zavieh told Gadola in a taped telephone conversation: “I have no liability and the money belongs to the family and I have a lot of problems in Iran because we’ve got property, so I can drag this for another ten years, and by then my life may go off, I don’t know