Hillary Clinton may have interfered with US program against offshore banks
NEW YORK, USA — On the heels of revelations earlier this year about questionable Clinton family activities in Haiti, the Wall Street Journal revealed last week that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband accepted cash from Swiss bank UBS, after she intervened to help it out with the IRS, thus potentially undermining the Justice Department’s so-called Swiss Bank Program against offshore banks that assist US tax cheats.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly assisted UBS in scaling down the level of cooperation with the Justice Department regarding accounts of American tax cheats, to release only eight percent of the information demanded by the United States.
UBS later paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking engagements and also made donations to the Clinton Foundation.
“Whether the Clinton Foundation received donations from UBS as the direct or indirect result is immaterial. What is relevant is that the State Department interfered with an important law enforcement operation, and by doing do, diluted its effectiveness. Clinton ruined the effectiveness of the UBS matter; all the other tax cheats escaped unscathed,” former money launderer turned compliance expert Kenneth Rijock pointed out.
“The United States has had to put up with non-cooperation, and dilatory tactics, from Swiss banks; do we really need an official of an agency of our own government assisting them?” Rijock asked.
The Wall Street Journal outlined how Clinton helped the global bank.
“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reported. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in US federal court. Within months, Mrs Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement — an unusual intervention by the top US diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”
Reporters James Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus then laid out how UBS helped the Clintons.
“Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they reported. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management chief executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”
The article added that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr Clinton.”
