Swiss banks Edmond de Rothschild (Suisse) and Edmond de Rothschild (Lugano), collectively called EdR Switzerland, have reached a joint resolution with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) over the tax evasion cases under the department’s Swiss bank programme.
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EdR Switzerland has agreed to pay a penalty of $45.24m to the US to avoid prosecution over allegations that it helped US citizens avoid paying taxes.
As per terms of the non-prosecution deal, the bank has agreed to cooperate in any related criminal or civil proceedings, demonstrate its implementation of controls to prevent misconduct involving undeclared US accounts and pay penalties.
The US DoJ in a statement said that the bank held a total of 950 US related accounts with a maximum aggregate value of more than $2.16bn since 1 August 2008.
EdR Switzerland, a private bank in Switzerland, provides private banking and wealth management services for individual clients across the world. It is affiliated with the Edmond de Rothschild Group, a family-controlled financial group focused on HNWI clients.
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By GlobalDataThe bank offered a variety of traditional Swiss banking services that helped US taxpayers in hiding their assets from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) including hold mail, code name and numbered account services.
EdR Switzerland had also assisted clients in using sham entities and also offered offshore credit cards, cash cards and debit cards to repatriate funds from the undeclared accounts.
In addition, the bank has structured transfers of funds from undeclared accounts and facilitated the covert repatriation of undeclared accounts via cash withdrawals.
According to the DoJ, the bank had accepted the use of IRS forms that falsely stated under penalties of perjury that the sham entities beneficially owned the assets in the undeclared accounts and sold US securities from its undeclared US accounts for subverting its qualified intermediary (QI) Agreement with the IRS.
