UBS to stop offshore services for U.S. clients

Published 5:00 am Friday, July 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — Faced with a federal investigation into its private banking practices, the Swiss banking giant, UBS, said Thursday that it would stop offering offshore banking services to clients in the United States. Mark Branson, chief financial officer of the UBS global wealth management group, told a Senate subcommittee that the company would provide banking or securities services to U.S. residents only through companies licensed in this country, and that it would help the federal government identify American citizens engaging in tax fraud.

On Wednesday, a Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations released a report saying that UBS’s offshore practices helped American citizens hide an estimated $18 billion in 19,000 accounts from the Internal Revenue Service. In his testimony, Branson apologized for any compliance failures that might have happened and said the decision to close its Switzerland-based cross-border business was intended to ensure that such failures did not happen again.