Word: banker
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...that may be changing. Bradley Birkenfeld, a former UBS private banker, now sits in his brother's house in Boston, wearing an electronic monitoring device and waiting to be sentenced for his role in helping one client, California real estate billionaire Igor Olenicoff, hide some $200 million in assets, skirting more than $7 million in income taxes. UBS has shuttered its cross-border banking business for U.S. customers and has advised bankers who worked in that division not to travel to America for one important reason: they might be arrested...
...feds are squeezing UBS for the names of other clients. More Swiss and Liechtenstein banks might be next in line for a federal look-see, their vaunted secrecy laws notwithstanding. In light of Birkenfeld's arrest, private bankers from Zurich and Geneva to the Isle of Jersey off the coast of England are assuming a bunker mentality. One private banker in London, caught up on events at UBS, responded, "My God, we're doomed." Says Reuven Avi-Yonah, a professor and director of the international tax program at University of Michigan Law School: "The whole world of private banking...
...feds are disrupting one of the great niche businesses. As a private banker at UBS, Birkenfeld traveled from his home in Switzerland to the U.S. to court ultra-wealthy American clients at tennis tournaments and art fairs. He would explain, among other things, how to buy jewels and artwork using funds from their secret Swiss bank accounts while they were overseas. Once, at the request of a client, he bought diamonds with money from an offshore account and smuggled them into the States in a toothpaste tube...
...they are often made to feel like outsiders. Most Africans and South Asians living in Hong Kong have their own horror stories of racism, from humiliating police searches on the street to being blocked from entering clubs and bars. It's not out of the ordinary for an Indian banker to be denied a flat for rent on the grounds that the landlord doesn't want his property to smell like curry. "This has been going on too long in a city with world-class aspirations," says David O'Rear, chief economist of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce...
...college--his safety school, but still. In Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker's a pot dealer who sells to successful, bored, suburban business types. Even the protagonists of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay, the closest thing we have to a modern Cheech and Chong, are a banker and a med student. Pot smokers aren't outsiders anymore; at worst, they're arrested adolescents...