France: Swiss bank UBS on appeal for illegal canvassing
The offices of the Swiss bank UBS in Zurich, October 30, 2012. REUTERS / Arnd Wiegmann
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The UBS bank's appeal trial begins this Monday, March 8 in France.
At first instance, in 2019, the criminal court sentenced the bank to the heaviest sentence ever inflicted in France in a case of tax evasion: a fine of 3.7 billion euros.
The banking giant immediately appealed.
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UBS is suspected of having then illegally sent, between 2004 and 2012, salespeople to France to “
convince
” wealthy clients of its subsidiary to open undeclared accounts in Switzerland.
►Also read: UBS judgment: the Swiss bank heavily condemned but not sunk
According to the prosecution, the bank has set up parallel and manual accounting to hide these cross-border capital movements.
The Swiss giant assures him that it was a simple assessment tool and that no canvassing act has been established.
10 billion euros hidden
Be that as it may, at the end of 2015, some 4,000 UBS clients regularized their situation with the “
sobering up
”
cell
opened in France.
3 billion 700 million euros were recovered by the tax authorities out of an estimated total of 10 billion euros in assets hidden in this case.
At the end of the first trial, the court followed the requisitions of the national financial prosecutor's office by condemning the banking establishment for illicit canvassing and money laundering aggravated by tax evasion.
In addition to the fine for UBS AG, the parent company, UBS France was fined for complicity of 15 million euros.
The Swiss bank, its subsidiary and three former executives had also been ordered to jointly pay 800 million euros in damages to the French State, which had constituted a civil party.
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