Financial Transparency Coalition

The New York Times is reporting that another US private banking client (Juergen Homann) of UBS has pleaded guilty in a tax evasion case.  According to the NY Times:

In court filings, federal prosecutors accused Mr. Homann of deliberately failing to submit a form known as an F-bar in 2007 disclosing his UBS accounts and of using a foundation in Liechtenstein, a noted tax haven, to conceal the trail. The filings said that Mr. Homann concealed $5 million from United States tax authorities by shifting that amount from his UBS account to a sham corporation, ELM Finance, set up in Hong Kong in 2005.

The court papers did not identify Mr. Homann’s private banker at UBS.

But they said that Mr. Homann worked with a Swiss lawyer, Matthias Rickenbach, to set up sham corporations overseas to funnel his UBS money to accounts he could then access without alerting the Internal Revenue Service.

Sounds about par for the course.  This is why we need transparency in the international financial system.  He couldn’t do this sort of thing if disclosure of the beneficial ownership of corporations were required.  Or if the automatic exchange of tax information occurred between countries.