Reuters reports: The Swiss Sunday newspaper “Sonntagszeitung” said the alpine nation was flooded with formal tracing requests from foreign tax authorities. In response, Switzerland had resorted to listing names, birthdates and nationalities in its federal gazette, where official texts are published.

The official justification was that the publication gave those identified the chance to hire a lawyer and seek legal recourse, said the “Sonntagszeitung”, referring to recent roll-backs of Swiss bank secrecy, especially under US pressure.
Formal requests from abroad

The newspaper quoted Swiss federal tax authority official Alexandre Dumas as saying that banks had little interest in seeking customers who no longer kept their accounts in Switzerland.

Instead, foreign countries were sending formal judicial assistance requests, asking for help to trace their missing taxpayers via Switzerland’s federal tax administration in Berne.
In turn, Switzerland was demanding that such countries, when sent Swiss documentation on such suspects, keep their further details confidential.
Further ‘taboo break’

It amounted, however, to a further “taboo break” by Swiss authorities, “Sonntagszeitung” said, while also quoting a Swiss lawyer, Andreas Rüd, who said many suspects did not realize that they could seek Swiss legal recourse.

The Swiss federal gazette’s weekly editions in May contained several dozen decrees, naming citizens of Spain, India, the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, the USA and South Korea and companies registered in Panama, the Bahamas and Spain.
In the case of India and Germany, Dumas denied that their formal requests stemmed from tax authorities recent acquisitions of stolen data listing suspected tax evaders.

Last year in Germany, suspected tax evaders filed a record 40,000 self-disclosure notices on funds they had secreted abroad, prompted by a new law that allows backdated payment of overdue tax coupled with penalties.

In February, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) made public data files leaked to French authorities in the so-called SwissLeaks case. The London-based HSBC bank was accused of helping suspects in some 200 countries.
HSBC apologized and its Swiss branch said it had been “cooperately continuously” with Swiss authorities since it became aware of the data theft in 2008.
That followed agreements by Swiss giants UBS and Credit Suisse to pay fines in the US on allegations of helping Americans to evade taxes.

In March, Switzerland signed an accord to automatically share tax information with Australia. Similar accords are planned with the US and EU.

The ever clever Matt Levine suggests that the more banks you charge with crime, the less damaging the charge is.  In Texas, the state employees’ pension fund stopped doing business with Credit Suisse last year because it had “a policy against hiring firms convicted of felonies,” but now that basically all the big banks have been convicted of felonies, it has tossed that policy. Welcome back Credit Suisse! We’ve talked before about how charging all the banks with crimes de-stigmatizes those crimes, and I won’t belabor the point.

Our associate Andres Frank testifified before the US Department of Labor on January 15, 2015 on the Credit Suisse exemption.  Credit Suisse had pled guilty to a criminal charge of aiding and abetting tex evasion by US citizens.  Credit Suisse was granted a temporary exemption, but Maxine Waters, Congresswoman from Callifornia, insisted that a permanent exemption be preceded by hearings.

Perhaps to make it seem that the ‘culture of corruption’ apparent in Credit Suisse could be cured, the CEO stepped down after this hearing.  No final decision has yet been rendered.

Matt Levine, the ex-Goldman partner who knows whereof he speaks, writes for Bloomberg:  In London, Tom Hayes’s Libor manipulation trial started yesterday and this isn’t exactly legal advice but probably don’t say stuff like this in recorded interviews with criminal investigators?

“I mean I probably deserve to be sitting here because, you know, I made concerted efforts to influence Libor,” Hayes said in a Feb. 1, 2013, interview.

Or:

“The point is you’re greedy,” Hayes said in a 2013 interview with U.K. investigators that Chawla played for the jury. “You want every little bit of money you can get because” that’s your performance metric, he said.

One of my strong beliefs about financial crime is that the words “greed” and “greedy” have no analytical value. In a fraud case — where the accusation is that someone made money — saying that he wanted to make money is just a superfluous appeal to jurors’ emotions, a way to deny the humanity of the bankster whose fate they’re deciding. “His motive was a simple one: greed,” said the prosecutor, annoyingly. But Hayes agreed, and on tape! Not helpful.

Matt Levine at Bloomberg is not hopeful about the banks changing their ways after guilty pleas in the United States this week.   Here is the notice JP Morgan Chase sent its clients:  JP Morgan Chase DIsclosure Notice  

The JP Morgan Cover Letter with Disclosers sent with the disclosure begins: The purpose of this letter is to clarify the nature of the trading relationship between you and the Corporate & Investment Bank at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates (together, “JPMorgan” or the “Firm”) and to disclose relevant practices of JPMorgan when acting as a dealer, on a principal basis, in the wholesale spot foreign exchange (“FX”) markets.  We want to ensure that there are no ambiguities or misunderstandings regarding those practices.

Mea culpa?  Guilt?  JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie DImon does nothing but whine about regulations.  Is it time to hold banks to a reasonable standard?  Is it time to jail some of the big players?  Do we have to rethink banking?  Maybe.

Nomi Prins writes:  When Hillary Clinton video-announced her bid for the Oval Office, she claimed she wanted to be a “champion” for the American people. Since then, she has attempted to recast herself as a populist and distance herself from some of the policies of her husband. But Bill Clinton did not become president without sharing the friendships, associations, and ideologies of the elite banking sect, nor will Hillary Clinton. Such relationships run too deep and are too longstanding.

To grasp the dangers that the Big Six banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) presently pose to the financial stability of our nation and the world, you need to understand their history in Washington, starting with the Clinton years of the 1990s. Alliances established then (not exclusively with Democrats, since bankers are bipartisan by nature) enabled these firms to become as politically powerful as they are today and to exert that power over an unprecedented amount of capital. Rest assured of one thing: their past and present CEOs will prove as critical in backing a Hillary Clinton presidency as they were in enabling her husband’s years in office.

In return, today’s titans of finance and their hordes of lobbyists, more than half of whom held prior positions in the government, exact certain requirements from Washington. They need to know that a safety net or bailout will always be available in times of emergency and that the regulatory road will be open to whatever practices they deem most profitable.

Whatever her populist pitch may be in the 2016 campaign — and she will have one — note that, in all these years, Hillary Clinton has not publicly condemned Wall Street or any individual Wall Street leader.

Hillary Clinton’s access to her husband’s past banker alliances, amplified by the ones that she has formed herself, makes her more of a friend than an adversary to the banking industry. In her brief 2008 candidacy, all four of the New York-based Big Six banks ranked among her top 10 corporate donors. They have also contributed to the Clinton Foundation. She needs them to win, just as both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton did.

No matter what spin is used for campaigning purposes, the idea that a critical distance can be maintained between the White House and Wall Street is naïve given the multiple channels of money and favors that flow between the two. It is even more improbable, given the history of connections that Hillary Clinton has established through her associations with key bank leaders in the early 1990s, during her time as a senator from New York, and given their contributions to the Clinton foundation while she was secretary of state. At some level, the situation couldn’t be less complicated: her path aligns with that of the country’s most powerful bankers. If she becomes president, that will remain the case.  The Clintons and the Banks

Pam and Russ Martens write:  In 2013, it was only because of Senator Warren that we learned that the so-called Independent Foreclosure Reviews to settle the claims of 4 million homeowners who had been illegally foreclosed on by the bailed out Wall Street banks were a sham. The “independent” consultants were hired by the banks, paid by the banks, and the banks themselves were allowed to determine the number of victims.

It was Senator Warren who put the high frequency trading scam described in the Michael Lewis book, “Flash Boys,” into layman’s language the American people could understand.

In 2013, Warren, together with Senators John McCain, Maria Cantwell and Angus King, introduced the “21st Century Glass-Steagall Act.” Warren explained why the legislation is critically needed:

“By separating traditional depository banks from riskier financial institutions,” said Warren, “the 1933 version of Glass-Steagall laid the groundwork for half a century of financial stability. During that time, we built a robust and thriving middle class. But throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, Congress and regulators chipped away at Glass-Steagall’s protections, encouraging growth of the megabanks and a sharp increase in systemic risk. They finally finished the task in 1999 with the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which eliminated Glass-Steagall’s protections altogether.”

Nine years later, the financial system crashed, leaving the economy in the worst condition since the Great Depression.

Last December, Warren made headlines again, stepping onto the Senate floor to reveal to the American people how Citigroup, the bank that received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the country after it imploded from its own derivatives bets in 2008 – had just slipped language into the spending bill to overturn part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill meant to rein in that behavior going forward. Despite her pleas, the bill passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Obama.

Today, Warren is under fire by the “I” in F.I.R.E. – the insurance industry. On April 28, she sent letters to 15 insurance companies, including AIG, the international insurance company that blew itself up in 2008 by taking on the risks of Wall Street’s credit default swap bets and was bailed out with $182 billion from taxpayers.

The letters asked the insurance companies to provide Warren with the specifics on the incentives they offer to push the sale of annuities, the number and value of the incentives awarded, and the companies’ policies for disclosing these potential conflicts of interest. The letters were sent to the 15 companies with the highest 2014 annuity sales to individuals: Jackson National Life, AIG Companies, Lincoln Financial Group, Allianz Life, TIAA-CREF, New York Life, Prudential Annuities, Transamerica, AXA USA, MetLife, Nationwide, Pacific Life, Forethought Annuity, RiverSource Life Insurance, and Security Benefit Life.