Financial Transparency Coalition

It’s just been reported that US and Swiss governmnet authorities have initialed a settlement that would bring about an end to the UBS legal saga.  According to the Washington Post:

In a conference call Wednesday morning with the federal judge presiding over the case, Justice Department lawyer Stuart D. Gibson said the parties had initialed agreements and that they would ask the judge to dismiss the matter when the final documents are signed.

Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed, leaving unclear what each side gained or conceded.

So we still don’t know what the settlement entails, however rumors floating about last week suggested that the settlement would not require UBS to pay a fine and would only require the bank to release information on about 5,000 accounts – roughly 1/10 of the 52,000 names that the US had requested.

However, since then the settlement negotiations were delayed again, and the Swiss government held an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the case, so it’s possible that what looked like the likely settlement early last week, may not be the settlement that was initialed this morning.