UBS will immediately turn over names of about 250 clients - Can't wait to see the names on this list

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a_DEcZ2mRSGo&refer=home

UBS Will Disclose Names, Pay $780 Million to U.S.

Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- UBS AG, Switzerland’s largest bank, will pay $780 million and disclose the names of some secret account holders to avoid U.S. prosecution on a charge that it helped thousands of wealthy Americans evade taxes.

The Justice Department accused UBS of conspiring to defraud the U.S. by helping 17,000 Americans hide accounts from the Internal Revenue Service. The U.S. will drop the charge in 18 months if the bank reforms its practices, helps prosecutors and makes payments. UBS will immediately turn over names of about 250 clients, according to people familiar with the matter.

By gaining those names, the U.S. will pierce the veil of Swiss bank secrecy. The IRS, which has sought the names of all U.S. account holders since July, has met resistance from the Swiss government. The final number of account holders Zurich- based UBS must disclose will hinge on future legal battles, according to the agreement.

“UBS sincerely regrets the compliance failures,” Chairman Peter Kurer, 59, said in a statement after the accord was unsealed yesterday in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Client confidentiality, to which UBS remains committed, was never designed to protect fraudulent acts or the identity of those clients, who, with the active assistance of bank personnel, misused the confidentiality protections.”

[HereSince1628]

1. Yes, it will be interesting to see if Richard Pearl has a bigger stash than Dick Cheney

And whether Stanford makes both of them look like penny-ante players.

[Ikonoklast]

2. I already have a preliminary list of some of the tax cheats and criminals:

http://www.king-george.biz/wst_page5.html

We should keep Gitmo open for a while until we can round these people up.

[Greyhound]

3. Another tip of another ice berg. n/t

[CanonRay]

4. $5 says the public never sees the names.

Just like Heidi Fleiss' little black book.

[gratuitous]

5. What the hell?

The chairman of UBS says that client confidentiality "was never designed to protect fraudulent acts." It could hardly produce anything else. And only 250 names? Out of 17,000? I'm not sure what a "victory" might be in holding some of our fellow citizens to account and making them pay their fair share of taxes, but 250 out of 17,000 doesn't quite make it in my mind.

I want to know who these chiselers are; the ones who evaded taxes in war time and ran up even bigger deficits while the sons and daughters of those who played by the rules were fighting, killing and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Bonhomme Richard]

6. I don't think we are going to see the names of....

the well connected ones.
I'm a cynic when it comes to these things.