Bank America Visa

Credit Suisse Officials Charged in Tax Conspiracy

The Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service charged Markus Walder, who ran the unit for the Zurich-based bank, on Thursday, along with Susanne D. Rüegg Meier, a former manager at Credit Suisse; Andreas Bachmann, a former banker at a Credit Suisse subsidiary; and Josef Dörig, the founder of a Swiss trust company, with conspiring with other Swiss bankers to defraud the United States. 

The four were charged in a superseding indictment together with four other defendants (Marco Parenti Adami, Emanuel Agustino, Michele Bergantino and Roger Schaerer) who were charged in February.

Prosecutors claim the bankers helped their U.S. customers evade income taxes by setting up thousands of secret bank accounts at Credit Suisse and other Swiss banks holding up to $3 billion in assets.  The arrangement dates back to 1953 and involved two generations of U.S. customers, some of whom inherited the secret accounts.

The bankers allegedly set up an office in New York City to provide unlicensed and unregistered banking services to U.S. customers with undeclared accounts. According to prosecutors, Walder, Schaerer and the others allegedly made false statements and provided misleading information to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the IRS to hide the bank’s U.S. cross-border banking business and the role of the New York representative office in that business.

Prosecutors claim that Walder supervised the U.S. cross-border banking business, including the New York office headed by Schaerer, a Geneva-based team of bankers led by manager Marco Parenti Adami and a Zurich-based team of bankers led by Rüegg Meier, a senior official at Credit Suisse who also served as a private banker and helped U.S. customers with undeclared accounts.

Bachmann, a private banker who worked for a wholly-owned subsidiary of Credit Suisse, allegedly traveled to the United States to help customers stash their money in the secret Swiss bank accounts and evade taxes. Dörig, the founder of a Swiss trust company, was allegedly a preferred provider for Credit Suisse who helped U.S. customers create and maintain nominee tax haven entities and open secret accounts at Credit Suisse and its subsidiaries using the entities’ names.

Swiss banking secrecy laws helped the bankers hide their clients’ ownership of the accounts from the IRS. They allegedly destroyed statements and other account records sent by email and fax to the representative office in New York so the records of the secret accounts would not be found in the United States.

Tracing The Roots of Bank of America - Share And Review

Tracing The Roots of Bank of America

Bank of America is the largest bank holding company in the United States, its headquarters is in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the bank’s origins go back to 1904.

The financial institution is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, it employs up to 210,000 employees and generates billions of dollars in profit.

Bank America as it was previously known spread out beyond the borders of California in 1983 following the purchase of Seafirst Corporation of Seattle, and its banking subsidiary, Seattle-First National Bank. Seafirst at the time was at risk of being taken over by the federal authorities for going insolvent thanks to a number of bad loans it issued to the oil industry.

The BoA grew at the back of a long series of mergers and acquisitions, and its namesake was founded in 1923 as Bank of America, Los Angeles, by Orra E. Monnette. Through various laws and regulatory systems its growth was initially reduced to California.

Only after the removal of these restrictions did the expansion continue in 1983. In 1992 it purchased Security Pacific Corp, the largest ever takeover in banking history.

As of August 2009, the institution maintained 12.2% of all bank deposits in the United States, and forms part of the big four banking concerns of  America, together with Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JP Morgan and Chase.

The current Bank of America emerged through the acquisition of Bank of America by NationsBank in 1998. The new company continued its expansion plans, and also acquired the Boston-based FleetBoston Financial, whose origins date back to 1784.

 In 1960 the name in North Carolina National Bank was amended, after a series of acquisitions in Nations Bank. The Bank Americard is the predecessor of the VISA Card, Bank of America was its inventor with the publication of the first credit cards in 1959, and was renamed VISA in 1977.

Today, Bank of America is part of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 Index. Due to the 2007/2009 financial crisis, Bank of America was bailed out by the U.S. federal government for twenty billion U.S. dollars.

And in return the State was to receive Bank of America preferred shares. The shares of Bank of America fell during the crisis from in April 2007 to a share price of .14 in March 2009.

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