Infinite Unknown

The Justice Department today announced that a senior Swiss banker has been indicted on charges of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government by helping about 20,000 U.S. clients hide $20 billion in assets from the Internal Revenue Service.

The indictment of Raoul Weil alleged that he conspired with a host of others at his bank, overseeing a business that employed encrypted laptops, numbered accounts and counter-surveillance techniques to help American clients conceal their identities and evade taxes.

Weil oversaw the bank’s cross-border business that catered to U.S. clients, generating about $200 million a year in revenue for the bank, the Justice Department said in a news release.

The announcement did not name the bank, describing it only as a large Swiss bank with offices worldwide.

A report on UBS’s Web site says an executive name Raoul Weil was head of UBS’s wealth management international business between 2002 and 2007. The indictment says the Raoul Weil charged in the case was head of the unnamed Swiss bank’s wealth management business from 2002 through 2007.

Weil was named chairman and chief executive of UBS’s global wealth management and business banking operations in 2007, the UBS site said.

Other bank executives “at the highest levels of management” are unindicted co-conspirators, according to the indictment.

The action announced today is part of a larger clash between the U.S. government and the tradition of secrecy that has been central to Switzerland’s lucrative banking industry.

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Tags: Banks, Economy, Government, IRS, Justice Department, Politics, Switzerland, U.S., UBS

A GOP congressional leader who was wavering on giving President Bush authority to wage war in late 2002 said Vice President Cheney misled him by saying that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had direct personal ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and was making rapid progress toward a suitcase nuclear weapon.

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Tags: Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, CIA, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, FBI, George Bush, George Tenet, Government, Guantánamo, Iraq, John Ashcroft, Justice Department, Karl Rove, Military, Politics, Saddam Hussein, Surveillance, War, warrantless wiretapping program

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department made public on Friday a plan to expand the tools the Federal Bureau of Investigation can use to investigate suspicions of terrorism inside the United States, even without any direct evidence of wrongdoing.

Justice Department officials said the plan, which is likely to be completed by the end of the month despite criticism from civil rights advocates, is intended to allow F.B.I. agents to be more aggressive and pre-emptive in assessing possible threats to national security.

It would allow an agent, for instance, to pursue an anonymous tip about terrorism by conducting an undercover interview or watching someone in a public place. Such steps are now prohibited unless there is more specific evidence of wrongdoing.

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Tags: ACLU, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, FBI, Government, Justice Department, New World Order, Police State, Politics, U.S.

Government officials in charge of collecting billions of dollars worth of royalties from oil and gas companies accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drug use and illicit sex with employees of the energy firms, federal investigators reported yesterday.

Investigators from the Interior Department’s inspector general’s office said more than a dozen employees, including the former director of the oil royalty program, took meals, ski trips, sports tickets and golf outings from industry representatives. The report alleges that the former director, Gregory W. Smith, also netted more than $30,000 from improper outside work.

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Tags: Chevron, cocaine, corporations, corruption, Drugs, Economy, Justice Department, Oil, Politics, Sex, Shell

Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. will stop selling interest-rate swaps to government borrowers in the $2.6 trillion U.S. municipal bond market roiled by an antitrust probe and the near bankruptcy of Alabama’s most-populous county.

At least seven former JPMorgan bankers are under scrutiny in a Justice Department criminal investigation of whether banks conspired to overcharge local governments on swaps and other derivatives. The bank also is embroiled in negotiations over how to resolve a debt crisis with Jefferson County, Alabama, where the county’s former adviser says a group of firms led by JPMorgan, the third-largest U.S. bank by assets, overcharged it by as much as $100 million for financing a new sewer system.

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Tags: bankruptcy, Banks, Credit Crisis, credit crunch, debt, Economy, Government, JPMorgan, Justice Department, U.S., UBS, Wall Street

A top official warned of widening loan fraud in 2004, but the agency focused its resources elsewhere.

WASHINGTON — Long before the mortgage crisis began rocking Main Street and Wall Street, a top FBI official made a chilling, if little-noticed, prediction: The booming mortgage business, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, was starting to attract shady operators and billions in losses were possible.

“It has the potential to be an epidemic,” Chris Swecker, the FBI official in charge of criminal investigations, told reporters in September 2004. But, he added reassuringly, the FBI was on the case. “We think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis,” he said.

Today, the damage from the global mortgage meltdown has more than matched that of the savings-and-loan bailouts of the 1980s and early 1990s. By some estimates, it has made that costly debacle look like chump change. But it’s also clear that the FBI failed to avert a problem it had accurately forecast.

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Tags: Banks, Credit Crisis, credit crunch, Economy, FBI, Foreclosures, Government, Justice Department, Meltdown, mortgage crisis, Mortgages, U.S., Wall Street

Charles Ulrich talks about taxes from his Baxter, Minn. home. (AP Photo)

WASHINGTON - It took seven years, but Charles Ulrich did something many people dream about, but few succeed at: He beat the IRS in a tax dispute.
Not only that, but tax experts say potentially millions of other taxpayers could benefit from his victory.

The accountant from Baxter, Minn., challenged the method the IRS has used for more than 20 years to tax shares and cash distributed by mutual life insurance firms to their policyholders when they reorganize as public companies.

A federal court recently agreed with his interpretation.

“There’s a tremendous amount of money at stake,” said Robert Willens, a New York City-based tax analyst at Robert Willens LLC. “Tens of thousands of people could be in line for a refund.”

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Tags: Government, IRS, Justice Department, law, Politics, Taxes, taxpayers, U.S.

“There may have been multiple ‘positions’ which were reclassified … but they all appear to have been held by just one trader, and this was a very special trader, with an enormous concentration of positions in crude oil amounting to perhaps 460 million barrels, and not much interest in anything else,” noted John Kemp of RBS Sempra Commodities.
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A quiet data revision that has boosted by nearly 25 percent the number of oil futures contracts U.S. regulators think are held by speculators is raising eyebrows in the energy trading community.

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Tags: bankruptcy, Barclays, Commodities, Futures, Justice Department, NYMEX, Oil, Oil Futures, Oil Prices, RBS, SemGroup, Speculators, Trader, U.S.

WASHINGTON - Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

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Tags: anthrax, Bruce Ivins, FBI, Government, Justice Department, Suicide, terrorism, terrorists, U.S.

“…but the reality was that the Patriot Act was prepared way in advance of 9/11 and it sat dormant, awaiting an event to justify its implementation.”

“In the days after the attacks it was passed in the House by a majority of 357 to 66. It passed the Senate by 98 to 1. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) told the Washington Times that no member of Congress was even allowed to read the legislation.”
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Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig details government plans to overhaul and restrict the Internet

Amazing revelations have emerged concerning already existing government plans to overhaul the way the internet functions in order to apply much greater restrictions and control over the web.

Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.

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Tags: 9/11, Bush administration, civil liberties, Constitution, Government, Internet, Justice Department, law, New World Order, Patriot Act, Richard Clarke, Ron Paul, terrorism, U.S.