Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, The Atlantic, JUL 31, 2015

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.” Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.

SNIP...

As McClatchy noted last month in a more broadly focused article that also mentions UBS, “Ten of the world’s biggest financial institutions––including UBS, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs––have hired Bill Clinton numerous times since 2004 to speak for fees totaling more than $6.4 million. Hillary Clinton also has accepted speaking fees from at least one bank. And along with an 11th bank, the French giant BNP Paribas, the financial goliaths also donated as much as $24.9 million to the Clinton Foundation––the family’s global charity set up to tackle causes from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to climate change.”

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/

UBS, accused of helping tax evaders, leads the way in foreign-connected PAC giving

As a huge documents leak turns a spotlight on the global tax evasion industry, a Swiss company in hot water for similar activity is responsible for the greatest amount of known foreign-connected money in U.S. elections so far this cycle.

News outlets brought together by the Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists this week began publishing numerous reports, called the Panama Papers, linking the names of the world’s most rich and powerful individuals to secret shell companies in offshore tax havens. The journalists used as source material documents from “the biggest leak in whistleblower history,” according to Wired, which came from a Panamanian law firm that has for decades helped conceal vast amounts of wealth in tax shelters.

But ICIJ had been tracking tax evasion long before helping bring the Panama Papers to light, and in February wrote on the findings of an investigative report by the French newspaper Le Monde on UBS AG. The report showed the Swiss bank “knowingly helped French citizens hide their money from the taxman,” according to ICIJ.

French authorities in 2014 said the bank helped French citizens hide between U.S. $14 billion and $26 billion, according to ICIJ. The bank denied the charges. The report also notes that American authorities opened a new tax evasion case on UBS last year — after the bank paid the U.S. a $780 million fine in 2009.

It’s the bank’s U.S. subsidiary — UBS Americas — that has directed more money to Congress through its political action committee than subsidiaries of any other foreign company. UBS Americas’ PAC has given $645,250 to candidates so far in 2016 and gave about $1.5 million in 2014. The firm in second place isn’t even close: The U.K.’s BAE Systems has given $363,500 so far....

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/04/ubs-accused-of-helping-tax-evaders-leads-the-way-in-foreign-connected-pac-giving/