Word: olenicoff
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...More specifically, Justice officials have said he was not forthcoming about his role servicing Igor Olenicoff, the Russian-born, California-based real estate billionaire whom Birkenfeld brought to UBS from Barclays, where Birkenfeld worked before - a charge his lawyers deny. (In 2008, Olenicoff pleaded guilty, paid $52 million in taxes and interest and was sentenced to two years probation and 120 hours of community service. In 2009, Birkenfeld pleaded guilty to one conspiracy count related to tax evasion and in January 2010 began serving a 40-month sentence...
...hidden the fact that he once bought diamonds with illicit money in Europe and then spirited them to California stuffed in a toothpaste tube, all part of an effort to conceal $200 million in assets on which his client - the Russia-born, California-based real estate mogul Igor Olenicoff - owed $7.2 million in U.S. taxes. But at the same time, almost no one in the U.S. government would deny that Birkenfeld was absolutely essential to its landmark tax-evasion case against Swiss banking giant UBS. The former UBS employee turned whistle-blower exposed the previously hidden world of offshore...
...story of how he ended up headed for federal prison is still mired in sharply conflicting accounts. Justice officials claim that Birkenfeld was not completely forthcoming about his own dealings with particular clients, especially his biggest, the billionaire Olenicoff. Even as he was talking to the feds, they say, Birkenfeld was secretly advising the real estate mogul to move his money from UBS to Liechtenstein banks. (Olenicoff eventually settled for $53 million in tax and penalties...
...sounds simple. But that view not only contradicts Justice's own statement supporting a sentence reduction - Birkenfeld faced a possible five-year sentence for his work on behalf of Olenicoff - it's also flat-out wrong, says Stephen Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center, who has been involved with hundreds of whistle-blower cases. After all, he notes, it would be a serious disincentive if whistle-blowers could be tripped up by inadvertently leaving out some information the government might come across later...
...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...
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