Stupidity of Swiss Banks – Telling Swiss secrets: A banker's betrayal

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Subject:	Stupidity of Swiss Banks – FWC: Telling Swiss secrets: A banker's betrayal
Date:	Fri, 6 Aug 2010 10:37:34 -0700
From:	Jas Jain

How stupid of Swiss banks to put a born-and-bred American, where trustworthiness in banking and finance is in short supply, in a position with access to secrets. They should have limited the access to secrets to born-and-bred Swiss. It is a tribal world when it comes to who one can trust. Also, in their idiocy to compete the Swiss banks have copied the methods of Bankrupters and Fraudsters of New York City. Large publicly traded banks are nothing more than scams and the Swiss would pay the price for following the Gangs of New York. When people lose their heads catastrophes are not far behind.

Jas

-s-s-s-s-s-s-

Telling Swiss secrets: A banker's betrayal

By Michael Bronner

Created August 5, 2010 06:31

Subhead: 

Part 1: A UBS insider blows the whistle on Swiss banking.

Byline: 

Michael Bronner

For five years as a Geneva-based UBS bank director, 45-year-old Bostonian Bradley Birkenfeld lived the well-heeled life of an insider in the secret world of Swiss banking. That is, before he set out to break the bank. In an exclusive series of interviews with Birkenfeld, GlobalPost reveals how he blew the whistle on Swiss banking's rarefied world of secrecy and subterfuge, a scandal that is still reverberating around the globe. Birkenfeld believes he's a hero for exposing world-class tax evasion, but the judge in his case didn't see it that way. And now Birkenfeld is speaking out.

NEW YORK — It's the inner sanctum of Swiss banking — the heavily-guarded nexus between numbered Swiss bank accounts and their owner's good names — and it's the rare American that is allowed entry.

Bradley Birkenfeld was one of the few Americans who held the keys to the kingdom. A Boston-born, high-flying, cross-border banker at Switzerland's premier financial institution, UBS, he had access to the kind of secret account information that American law enforcement had only dreamed of through all the decades that terrorists, dictators, arms dealers, mafia dons and wealthy tax cheats had hidden behind the fortress of secrecy that Swiss banking promised.

Subterranean bomb-proof vaults and state-of-the-art security systems are the superficial trappings of Swiss banking and its culture of secrecy, but the cornerstone of protection for its clients is the numbered account system that offers all but foolproof privacy. Or so they thought.

 

At UBS, clients' names and their account information are divided irreconcilably between separate computer servers in secret locations. Even for a world-class hacker with free roam of electronic bank records, identifying the owner of a numbered account is literally "Mission: Impossible." Nowhere do names and numbers appear side-by-side.

At vaunted UBS, the only seam of vulnerability resided in nothing more advanced than the kind of old-school card catalog you might find in a local library.

At the start of business each morning, private bankers like Birkenfeld, then a director in the wealth management division of UBS, would check in at combination vaults to pull their "racks" — wooden trays of 4x5 paper index cards that are the Achilles heel of Swiss secrecy. Printed on each confidential client card — in plain, unencrypted typeset — is the client's name, account and safety deposit box numbers, the fees paid, and home addresses and unique passwords — secret challenge phrases known only to the banker and the client that are used to verify identity on the phone ("Rose and Eagle" on a surreptitiously photocopied card Birkenfeld showed me).

"If I was really devious ... I would have just taken my gym bag, slid them in, walked out the door, hopped on a plane," Birkenfeld laughed during our interview.

He'd have saved himself a whole lot of trouble if he had: 48 hours after our interview, the burly, energetic, balding banker with a high-pitched Boston lilt and trace goatee was due to report to federal prison in Pennsylvania, the last stop in a long, dangerous dance with U.S. prosecutors.

June 2007 found a wary Bradley Birkenfeld at the Geneva airport about to hop a plane. He didn't have the client cards, but he had taken plenty of other incriminating UBS documents upon quitting his position as a bank director the year before: emails, training manuals, PowerPoint presentations, and phone lists that detailed the mechanics of a massive fraud.

He had already begun to transfer some of the materials to private  attorneys in Washington. Now, he was on his way to meet them in person.

As Birkenfeld moved through the terminal, he glanced at his $50,000 Audemars Piguet wristwatch — one of only 750 made, as he liked to point out — but mostly he was looking over his shoulder.

"I assumed they were watching me," he said of his former UBS bosses, a fair assumption given that the UBS's wealth management chiefs were themselves well versed in subterfuge. The bank had held training sessions for cross-border bankers on how to elude FBI and U.S. Customs scrutiny when traveling with sensitive bank documents; how to obscure client information on PDAs and encrypted laptops; and various other evasive trade craft not usually associated with honest banking. Birkenfeld had the pilfered PowerPoints to prove it.

…