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Whistleblowers allege failed bank helped rich Americans evade taxes in bombshell claims
March 29, 2023
Credit Suisse, the failed Swiss bank that was just purchased by the UBS Group, has a history of facilitating tax evasion in the United States — but a pair of whistleblowers say it has been continuing for years after regulators and prosecutors thought they had stamped it out, reported CNBC on Wednesday.
"For years, the private bank has provided a safe haven for wealthy American clients to hide assets from the IRS — even after it was caught and prosecuted for doing the same thing more than a decade ago, according two former Credit Suisse bankers who spoke in exclusive interviews with CNBC and are working with the U.S. government as whistleblowers," reported Eamon Javers.
As part of a plea deal in 2014, Credit Suisse "admitted ... that it used sham entities, destroyed account records, and hand delivered cash to American clients to avert IRS detection — agreeing to crack down on U.S. tax dodgers going forward as part of its plea deal. Credit Suisse also agreed at the time to a host of reforms, including disclosing its cross-border activities and cooperating with authorities when they request information, among other things."
According to these two executives, however, Credit Suisse has been violating this agreement — and Senate investigators say that the bank "enabled as many as 25 American families to hide fortunes totaling more than $700 million in the bank in the years after the bank’s plea agreement."
READ MORE: Trump busted for telling a 'story that cannot possibly be true' by CNN fact checker
Even before the current banking instability, Credit Suisse was on regulators' radar, with authorities last year considering stripping it of the right to managing pension fund assets in the United States.
Amid the bank's failure, the Swiss National Bank poured $100 million of liquidity into it and "agreed to provide UBS with some $9 billion to backstop losses resulting from the takeover," according to the report.
However, this revelation could put UBS on the hook for some of Credit Suisse's new legal liabilities. According to lawyers representing the whistleblowers, UBS could be responsible for paying up to $1.3 billion to settle the new tax evasion claims.
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Former President Donald Trump has been ramping up his attacks on potential presidential rival Ron DeSantis, but CNN fact checker Daniel Dale has found a number of egregious whoppers in his attacks on the Florida governor.
One of the most egregious instances, writes Dale, comes from Trump telling a "story that cannot possibly be true" when discussing his decision to endorse DeSantis in 2018.
Specifically, Trump claimed that he decided to give DeSantis a chance after seeing the future Florida governor on television defending him against the "impeachment hoax," and Dale notes that this claim is completely out of sync with the actual timeline of when these events occurred.
"Trump issued his official endorsement of DeSantis in June 2018 – but his first impeachment battle, over his effort to pressure Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden, did not begin until the fall of 2019," writes Dale. "Trump might have been thinking of how DeSantis defended him over a special counsel investigation in 2017 into his campaign’s relationship with Russia, which he has also called a 'hoax,' but that probe did not lead to impeachment."
READ MORE: GOP probes 'seem to be flopping' as voters see them as 'revenge': analysis
This wasn't the only false or misleading claim Trump made against DeSantis, Dale finds, as Trump also quoted crime statistics about Florida without putting them into the context of population size. Additionally, Trump's criticisms of DeSantis for closing beaches at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic came when Trump's own administration was calling for a nationwide shutdown to try to contain the virus that would go on the kill more than 1 million Americans.
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One of the largest black holes ever recorded has been discovered using a new technique that could spot thousands more of the insatiable celestial monsters in the coming years, according to astronomers.
The ultramassive black hole, one of just four ever observed, is more than 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, a new study said.
It is the first black hole ever observed using a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which light traveling towards us from a distant galaxy appears to magnify and bend inwards, giving away the presence of a dark giant.
James Nightingale, an astronomer at the UK's Durham University and the study's lead author, told AFP the process was "similar to shining light through the base of a wine glass".
He said it was "very fortuitous" that the light of a galaxy in the distant universe travelled extremely close to this black hole, which is roughly two billion light years from Earth.
It could even be the biggest black hole ever recorded, but it was difficult to say for sure given the varying techniques and uncertainties involved, he added.
Supermassive black holes sit at the centre of galaxies using their vast gravitational pull to gobble up stars like specks of dust, not even allowing light to escape.
Previous black holes of this size have been observed when their voracious devouring gives off huge amounts light at the margins -- or by measuring the orbit of stars that speed up as they pass by.
But these techniques only work for galaxies relatively close to Earth.
Landscape to 'dramatically change'
Gravitational lensing allows astronomers to "discover black holes in the other 99 percent of galaxies that are currently inaccessible," Nightingale said.
There are currently around 500 known gravitational lenses -- at least one of which we now know is a supermassive black hole.
But "the landscape is about to dramatically change," Nightingale said.
The European Space Agency's Euclid mission, planned to launch into space in July, will open a "big data era" for black hole hunters by creating a huge high resolution map of the universe, he said.
In the next six years Euclid could find 100,000 new gravitational lenses, which would potentially point towards thousands of previously hidden black holes, Nightingale added.
For the latest discovery, the researchers used computer simulations and images from the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm their findings, as well as eliminating other possibilities such as an overconcentration of dark matter.
The huge size is also consistent with what would be expected for a black hole at the centre of its giant host galaxy, Nightingale said.
The mass of all the stars in the galaxy, dubbed Abell 1201, is more than a trillion times that of our Sun, meaning it would be expected to have a particularly large black hole at its centre.
The study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Tuesday.
© 2023 AFP
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