A short bit of pondering on the (now settled) UBS case:
"It will take a little time for agreements to be signed in final form," Gibson told Gold today in a telephone conference call.Tax lawyers said they expect UBS to disclose thousands of accounts after giving the Internal Revenue Service data on 250 clients on Feb. 18. UBS, based in Zurich, agreed then to pay $780 million to defer prosecution for aiding tax evasion. (Emphasis ours)
It isn't often that you hear the reality of this sort of extortion spelled out so clearly. Amazingly, this time it was on Bloomberg. We thought this sort of rank regulatory revenue enhancement during times of fiscal crisis was limited to things like reducing the Yellow-To-Red timing for photo-equipped stop lights by a half a second. Boy were we wrong.
UBS Tax Lawsuit Settled by U.S., Swiss Governments [Bloomberg]
Posted by guest , Aug 12, 2009 10:24AM
UBS sucks. Seriously, who works there?
Posted by guest , Aug 12, 2009 10:40AM
The number of posts today is ridiculous. Its almost as if Bess set a minimum number of posts to be made while she was gone, and GM/EP just pulled their heads out of their collective asses and realized that they were on pace to be 50 posts short.
Posted by guest , Aug 12, 2009 10:41AM
Yes, paying a fine for aiding and abetting tax evasion is exactly extortion. Nice work, Ms. Ayn Rand!
(please bring back Bess NOW)
Posted by guest , Aug 12, 2009 10:53AM
Dealbreaker, get your facts right. This is not news--UBS agreed to pay that money in February. The details of the settlement that was announced today haven't been determined yet, and it's still unclear whether UBS will pay more in fines.
Posted by guest , Aug 12, 2009 11:16AM
quite honestly the worst post in a series of utterly useless/boring/uninformed posts. yet I have this strange feeling like it will get worse...queue greg
Posted by guest , Aug 12, 2009 11:24AM
EP -you should round up your classmates from the New School extension class "Constipated Prose Styling For the Win" and form a posse to stop this. You can all get on tandem bicycles, ride down to the federal building and make citizen's arrests of each person who walks out for crimes against sophistication and failure to add britishisms to their emails. Then you can all go to a diner and eat snickers bars with forks and knives while laughing at people who walk by. This has to happen.
Posted by guest , Aug 12, 2009 7:43PM
How is this extortion, dummy? The U.S government has enough evidence on UBS to ban from them from doing business here and seize all their assets in the country.