Aug. 20, 2009 (United Press International) -- The U.S. Justice Department has charged a banker and a lawyer from Switzerland with conspiring to help wealthy Americans hide assets from the IRS.
Papers filed in a U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., charge a director of NZB Neue Zurcher Bank of Zurich Hansruedi Schumacher and attorney Matthias Rickenbach with helping clients "obtain offshore credit cards and create sham loan documents."
The charges claim Schumacher and Rickenbach helped clients "disguise" funds to make them look like money inherited from foreign relatives. Simultaneously, they "falsified" bank documents to make their clients appear as though they were Swiss citizens, The New York Times reported Thursday.
The indictments widen an investigation that led to UBS (NYSE:UBS) bank agreeing to pay a $780 million fine in February. This week, UBS agreed to disclose the names of 4,450 U.S. clients whose accounts the Internal Revenue Service estimated once held $18 billion. With the agreement to disclose names, the fine was waived.
Swiss banks are estimated to hold about one-third of the $7 trillion deposited in offshore accounts.
