UBS says more than 20 leave wealth management unit (warned not to travel to US on fears of arrests)

Source: Reuters

Thursday, May 29, 2008; 7:17 AM

LONDON (Reuters) - About 20 client advisers and some additional support staff have resigned from the wealth management arm of UBS AG (UBSN.VX) over the past few weeks, the world's largest wealth manager said on Thursday.

"It is entirely normal to see a peak in client adviser departures at this time of year following bonus season. UBS Wealth Management continues to attract and hire client advisers in all markets," John Pottage, the chief executive of the unit in Britain, said in a statement.

UBS has become Europe's biggest casualty of the global market turmoil, writing down at least $37 billion in the value of U.S. real estate assets, primarily related to subprime mortgages.

A source familiar with the matter said 18 advisers had left last week for start-up Vestra Wealth and about five resigned this week, two of them going to investment bank Rothschild (ROT.UL) and one to Merrill Lynch & Co Inc (MER.N).



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/29/AR2008052901126.html

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UBS tells unit staff to avoid US visits
By Haig Simonian in Zurich

Published: May 27 2008 23:30 | Last updated: May 27 2008 23:30

UBS has told members of its former private banking team responsible for rich US clients not to travel to America.

The Swiss bank has also made lawyers available to the more than 50 bankers involved, many of whom have left UBS since it decided last November to wind down its cross-border private banking business for US ­customers.

Lawyers for Mr Birkenfeld and the US government are due to appear before a judge next Monday “to resolve pre-trial motions and discovery problems”, according to court documents.

Many members of UBS’s former US team have left the bank amid concerns about the investigations and fears that the bank might not support them if arrested. “Many of us have the feeling we’d be expendable,” said one former team member.

more: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/060c5c38-2c17-11dd-9861-000077b07658.html

Foreclosure Phil Gramm


Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.

Gramm's long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec's workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited--at one point, according to Levitt's memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms--setting off a wave of merger mania.

Read the whole story here.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/foreclosure-phil.html

By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 17, 2002
When Senator Phil Gramm and his wife Wendy danced, it was most often to Enron's tune.

Mr. Gramm, a Texas Republican, is one of the top recipients of Enron largess in the Senate. And he is a demon for deregulation. In December 2000 Mr. Gramm was one of the ringleaders who engineered the stealthlike approval of a bill that exempted energy commodity trading from government regulation and public disclosure. It was a gift tied with a bright ribbon for Enron.

Wendy Gramm has been influential in her own right. She, too, is a demon for deregulation. She headed the presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration. And she was chairwoman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1988 until 1993.

In her final days with the commission she helped push through a ruling that exempted many energy futures contracts from regulation, a move that had been sought by Enron. Five weeks later, after resigning from the commission, Wendy Gramm was appointed to Enron's board of directors.

more:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E0D81038F934A25752C0A9649C8B63

Thieves

Interesting

Wall Street, lenders face new subprime probe, WSJ reports
Source: Reuters

Wall Street, lenders face new subprime probe, WSJ reports
Sun May 4, 2008 10:55pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Prosecutors in the Eastern
District of New York in Brooklyn are stepping up
their scrutiny of players in the subprime-mortgage
crisis, focusing on Wall Street firms and mortgage
lenders, the Wall Street Journal said on its Web
site on Sunday.

A task force of federal, state and local agencies
will look into potential crimes ranging from
mortgage fraud by brokers to securities fraud,
insider trading and accounting fraud, the Journal
said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is already
targeting major corporate insiders and criminal
groups in its investigation of fraud in the
mortgage lending industry. The FBI has said it
is investigating 19 companies in mortgage cases.

The formation of the task force amplifies efforts
already under way in Brooklyn, where prosecutors
are investigating whether investment bank UBS AG
(UBSN.VX) improperly valued its mortgage-
securities holdings, the report said.

-snip-


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=3296633

Is this post really about them being broke or did I miss something? :shrug:

UBS Faces U.S. Tax Evasion Probe; Employee Detained (Update7)

By Otis Bilodeau

May 7 (Bloomberg) -- UBS AG, the world's biggest money manager for rich individuals, said the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether the Swiss bank helped clients evade American taxes.

One senior bank employee was ``briefly detained'' by U.S. authorities as a ``material witness,'' the firm said in an e- mailed statement. The Financial Times reported that the employee was Martin Liechti, the Zurich-based head of UBS's international wealth management business for the Americas. Rohini Pragasam, a UBS spokeswoman in New York, declined to comment on the FT report. Liechti could not immediately be reached for comment.

Clients pulled a net 12.8 billion francs ($12.1 billion) from UBS's asset- and wealth-management units in the first quarter, the first withdrawal in almost eight years as the bank's writedowns swelled to $38 billion. German prosecutors said in March they're weighing a criminal investigation into whether UBS helped clients evade taxes.

``UBS has been hit by a perfect storm,'' said Edwin Merner, who oversees $2 billion at Atlantis Investment Research Corp. in Tokyo. ``Clients may run away if they think they'll leak information to tax authorities in Germany and the U.S.''

more:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=akMbhDu9hSu8&refer=home


U.S. seeks reports on Americans' foreign bank accounts
Source: IHT



In its hunt for wealthy Americans who have stashed money overseas to evade taxes, the U.S. government has turned to an obscure law enacted nearly four decades ago.

Under the law, originally aimed at rooting out laundering of drug money, citizens or residents of the United States must tell the Internal Revenue Service each year if they have any foreign bank or financial accounts holding a total of $10,000 or more. Income from the assets is taxed at ordinary rates of up 35 percent.

The law took effect in 1970, but many taxpayers have either ignored it or were not aware of it, and the Treasury Department has rarely enforced it. The IRS estimates that one million American taxpayers warrant disclosure, but that as few as one in four file the disclosures.

Now, as it intensifies its efforts to root out offshore tax evasion, the IRS is moving to enforce the law aggressively and to apply stiff new penalties to taxpayers who don't file the disclosures. "There is definitely a renewed emphasis on this," said Kevin Packman, a tax lawyer at Holland & Knight.

IHT

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=3310535

If Obama had the same relationship with Gramm or somebody like him, every station would be talking about this all day, talking about how it "compromises" his "change message," then Obama would give a press conference about it, and they'd bring in a "body language expert" to analyze that, etc.

but I wasn't taken up on it (not that I really expected them to, I had already been notified of being laid off). They definitely have a problem, IMO, their holocaust gold history (UBS is the renamed Swiss Bank after its merger with Union Bank of Switzerland) makes them an attractive destination for sociopathic bankers, again IMO. Of course if their current management is akin to the one that instituted the sociopathic holocaust gold strategy then they have even more problems. My proposal letter, if interested: http://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/proposal-to-ubs-upper-management/