JUAN GONZALEZ: Stephen Kohn, could you talk a little bit about the extent,
how massive this fraud was? Because, as you explained to me earlier this
week, every one of these Americans who were holding these accounts had to,
on their tax forms every year, check a box. The government required them to
say whether they held any foreign bank accounts. And they were not reporting
those to the government. So every annual tax form that each of these rich
Americans was filing was a fraud. And that the bank actually agreed never to
provide any written documentation to their clients, that basically
Birkenfeld and all of the UBS bankers, every quarter, came to the United
States with encrypted computers to have personal meetings with these clients
so they could know what was going on with their accounts?
STEPHEN KOHN: Yeah, exactly. What you’re saying is completely true. They
secretly entered the United States under false pretexts. They had—Birkenfeld
didn’t bring an encrypted computer, but the forty-nine others did, secretly
met with clients. Birkenfeld laid all this out to the Justice Department. He
agreed to wear a wire. He agreed to go—live in Switzerland with the people
he hung out with, wear a wire, to tell the Justice Department when these
bankers were traveling, what hotels they were staying at. He gave them their
cell phone numbers. He pointed them in the direction of how they could learn
the identities of these thousands of Americans.
STEPHEN KOHN: The last thing I want to say is, the National Whistleblowers
Center, on our webpage, whistleblowers.org, you can come on, and you can
sign a very simple email letter to the Attorney General asking for a review
of Mr. Birkenfeld’s case. I think it’s very important that the public weigh
in on this.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Although Attorney General Holder has had to recuse himself,
because he once was a bank—he once was a lawyer for UBS.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/7/why_is_the_whistleblower_who_exposed