UBS clients start paying the price
Friday, October 30th, 2009Ex-client of UBS gets house arrest for tax fraud
Wed Oct 28, 2009 12:31pm EDT
By Tom Brown
MIAMI (Reuters) - A former client of UBS AG who cooperated in a U.S. probe of the Swiss bank’s ties with wealthy Americans hiding money overseas was sentenced to one year house arrest and a fine on Wednesday for a multimillion-dollar tax evasion scheme.
Steven Michael Rubinstein, 55, was the first former customer of UBS to be sentenced for tax fraud following a protracted U.S. legal battle with the bank that ended in August with an agreement to crack open Switzerland’s long tradition of bank secrecy.
Rubinstein, a Florida accountant who pleaded guilty to a single count of tax evasion in June, was sentenced to a total of three years of probation including 12 months of house arrest. He was also ordered to pay a $40,000 fine.
<…> Rubinstein’s sentence, handed down by a federal court judge in Miami, was in line with the Justice Department’s recent request for leniency for Rubinstein due to what it described as his substantial cooperation in a probe centering on Americans with undisclosed offshore accounts at UBS.
The U.S. government had alleged that Rubinstein, who worked for a company in the yacht business, evaded taxes on $3 million by stashing funds in a British Virgin Islands corporation set up through a UBS account that was active from 2001 to 2008.
He had faced a maximum sentence of three years in prison, but the Justice Department called for no more than a 12-month sentence in a court filing last Friday.<…>
For full text article refer to: Reuters