Federal prosecutors filed charges on Thursday against three Credit Suisse private bankers – including a senior executive – in an ongoing Justice Department crackdown of foreign banks that allegedly helped U.S. citizens evade millions in taxes, Reuters reported.
Authorities filed charges in Alexandria, Va., against Markus Walder, a former senior Credit Suisse executive; Susanne D. Rüegg Meier, a former manager; and Andreas Bachmann, a former banker at a Credit Suisse subsidiary. Josef Dorig, the founder of a Swiss trust company that worked with the bank, was also charged.
All four bankers are accused of conspiring to defraud the United States, the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service. Walder also faces charges of lying to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2005 and 2007 and the IRS about the bank’s activities in the U.S and the role of a New York representative office.
Court documents did not name the bank connected with the charges, but a anonymous government official told Reuters it is Credit Suisse.
Credit Suisse, which has been under scrutiny since 2008, announced last week that it is the target of a criminal investigation into alleged banking activities that allowed U.S. citizens to evade taxes.
That announcement bolstered concerns that the bank could face a similar situation as UBS in 2009, when that bank agreed to pay $780 million in fines and hand over data on thousands of clients in a settlement with the Justice Department.
The latest charges came in a superseding indictment that added to existing charges filed in Feburary against four other Credit Suisse bankers: Marco Parenti Adami, Emanuel Agustoni, Michele Bergantino and Roger Schaerer. They bring the number of charged individuals from the bank up to seven.
