Four Swiss bankers have been indicted on charges that they were part of a decades-long conspiracy to help thousands of rich Americans hide billions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice and the IRS said Wednesday.
The four, Marco Parenti Adami, Emanuel Agustino, Michele Bergantino and Roger Schaerer, work for an international bank headquartered in Zurich and having offices in cities around the world, including New York City and Miami, the authorities said. The found were indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia and charged with conspiring with other Swiss bankers to defraud the United States, the DOJ and the IRS.
The authorities said the four worked with “high net worth individuals” to help them evade taxes through “illegal cross-border banking,” secret accounts and travel to the Bahamas and Switzerland.
As of 2008, the authorities said, the international bank maintained “thousands of secret accounts for customers in the United States with as much as $3 billion in total assets under management in those accounts.”
Although the indictment did not name the bank, The New York Times reported that people familiar with the case had identified it as Credit Suisse. The Times reported that investigators in Germany had raided the offices and homes of four Credit Suisse employees in an operation that a prosecutor called part of a “very, very extensive investigation.”
“The conspiracy dates back to 1953 and involved two generations of U.S. tax evaders including U.S. customers who inherited secret accounts at the international bank,” according to a statement by Neil H. McBride, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; John A. DiCicco, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Tax Division, and Douglas Shulman, Commissioner of the IRS.
The announcement is tantalizing for what it doesn’t say, especially who the “high net worth individuals” are and whether charges against them are imminent. While the authorities did not say so, the abundance of detail in the announcement suggests that investigators may have obtained the cooperation of some people who hope to minimize their punishment. As for the four who have been indicted, the authorities said they face up to five years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 if they are convicted.
