Last week, the Swiss banking giant UBS agreed to pay a fine of $748m (£520m) and hand over details of some 250 clients to US investigators. The bank finally admitted to fault labeling it “mistakes and inadequate control systems” yada yada…

The claims from the feds were that the bankers helped some U.S. account holders evade $300 million a year in taxes by dumping the customers records into the shredder and providing them with ‘out of town’ Swiss credit cards for their lofty spending sprees. However, as everyone knows the real issue with the Swiss is that they have been purchasing US financial institutions such as BoA’s private banking facilities for Europe and Asia. Duh, UBS now owns Paine Webber!

As an offshore business or private foreign bank, you can’t have branch offices in downtown Manhattan and not expect a revenue agent to walk through your lobby requesting information. Then once that happens the issue is no longer, ‘we can’t provide that info’ the real issue then becomes, [feds]‘we’re not going to allow you that banking license anymore because you don’t cooperate with us’.  Oh Oh!

So here’s the rub from the Swiss….”you blackmailed us into giving up private banking customers. you have hurt our banking reputation, we are mad and going to get even.”

The Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) better known as the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) is today the largest political party in the country. Among other vengeful suggestions like prohibiting the sale of U.S. funds in Switzerland and blocking ex-Guantanamo inmates from taking up residence in their fine country, the SVP is proposing to repatriate the gold stored by the Swiss National Bank from the US vaults.

The big question of the day is if the Swiss ask for their gold back is that gold available for delivery “deliverable”?  Has the 1,064 tonnes of gold been leased out?

Is the US actually holding any bullion for the Swiss or is it all on paper?

What do you think would happen if the SVP is successful in their ‘revenge’ efforts?

Sources: http://www.econoshock.be/… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

UBS AG signed a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida admitting that it helped U.S. clients hide their account from the Internal Revenue Service. As part of the agreement, UBS has consented to provide the United States government with the identities of certain United States customers of its cross-border business and forfeit $780 million.