Wolf’s financial institution’s parent company UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank and the world’s largest private wealth manager, with $1.9 trillion in client assets and nearly 84,000 employees in fifty countries, including 32,000 in the United States, was one of two exposed in the results of the Congressional Committee’s six-month investigation.
It was not UBS’s most honorable corporate moment. “The Statement of Facts in the Birkenfeld criminal case describes additional actions taken by UBS bankers to help U.S. clients manage their Swiss accounts without alerting U.S. authorities. It states, for example, that UBS bankers advised U.S. clients to withdraw funds from their accounts using Swiss credit cards that “could not be discovered by the United States authorities”, to “destroy all off-shore banking records existing in the United States”; and to “misrepresent the receipt of funds from the Swiss bank account in the United States as loans from the Swiss Bank.”440.
The Statement of facts also discloses that, on one occasion, “at the request of a U.S. client, defendant Birkenfeld purchased diamonds using that U.S. client’s Swiss bank account funds and smuggled the diamonds into the United States in a toothpaste tube,” presumably so that the U.S. client could obtain possession of his Swiss assets without alerting U.S. authorities.