“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.” ...
Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”
Someday I May Ask You For A Favor
A small favor, such as good friends might ask of each other. Like maybe millions of dollars.
I'm reminded of the scene in The Godfather in which Bonasera approaches the Don for vengeance on behalf of his daughter. The Don says to Bonasera, "Some day--and that day may never come--I will call upon you to do me a service." I'm sure that the former Secretary of State left that to chance when performing a service for UBS as well.
ReplyDeleteAnd now people know why the Switzerland banks are considered very stable, especially for the retention of valuable metals.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the truly rich and powerful, have all kinds of shell corporations and branch accounts, they don't put their eggs in one basket. But an America would have far bigger immunity to search and seizure of, say gold, in Switzerland accounts than in American ones.