Swiss banker pleads guilty in US tax fraud case

A former UBS banker pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges he helped wealthy American clients hide their money from US tax authorities as American officials stepped up a crackdown on offshore tax evasion.

Renzo Gadola, a Swiss citizen who worked at UBS AG from 1995 to 2008 and was arrested last month, entered his plea in a Miami federal court.

US authorities say Gadola, an investment adviser based in Switzerland, encouraged his clients not to disclose their undeclared offshore accounts.

He was charged with working with another unidentified ex-UBS banker in helping clients shift their undeclared money from UBS accounts to a smaller Switzerland-based bank, Basler Kantonalbank.

Gadola is out on bond but faces up to five years in jail. Sentencing in his case is set for March 10.

The case has again cast light on how some bankers worked to assist wealthy Americans conceal their money from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) even as US authorities cracked down on rich tax cheats in a probe that mushroomed into a major international judicial and diplomatic affair involving UBS.

"The lesson here is that the IRS is not only investigating and prosecuting the owners of the undeclared foreign accounts," Rubinstein & Rubinstein, a New York-based law firm, said in commentary about the Gadola case.

"The IRS is also targeting people who facilitated and assisted in non-compliance," it said.

"Even smaller banks are 'on the radar'."

US authorities recently ended their probe into UBS, which had been charged by federal prosecutors with helping roughly 17,000 clients with $20 billion in assets hide their accounts from the IRS.

UBS paid $780 million as part of a settlement and handed over the names of more than 250 client accounts and ended its US cross-border banking business.

Prosecutors say Gadola's case involved a Mississippi client who had kept $445,000 in a safe deposit box before transferring it first to UBS and then to a Basler Kantonalbank account.

The client later told Gadola and the unidentified Swiss banker he wanted to declare the money under a voluntary disclosure programme launched by the IRS, but was advised against it because the amount of money was too small.

Gadola was arrested after a November 6 meeting with the client at a Miami hotel. Prosecutors say he tried to dissuade the client from declaring the funds by saying there was "99.9%" chance the money would never be discovered by US tax officials.