by Jeremy Kuzmarov, Global Research:
When this Whistleblower Exposed the Crimes of Obama’s Golf Partner and 12th Largest Campaign Contributor, the U.S. Justice Department Did the Honorable Thing—It Jailed the Whistleblower and Let Obama’s Golf Partner Walk Away Free
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Bradley Birkenfeld is a former Swiss banker who helped the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recoup billions of dollars in tax revenues after exposing the largest tax fraud in U.S. history.
Yet it was Birkenfeld who served 40 months at the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, while his bosses who orchestrated the fraud and the wealthy investors who cheated the U.S. government never faced any jail time.
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The egregious double standard by which whistleblowers go to prison and those on whom they blow the whistle go free is all too typical in today’s two-tiered U.S. justice system.
In April, Apple whistleblower Ashley Gjovik wrote an article in CovertAction Magazine aptly entitled “Whistleblowers Are the Conscience of Society, Yet Suffer Gravely For Trying to Hold the Rich and Powerful Accountable For Their Sins.”
It detailed the backlash and abuse that whistleblowers often face and the impunity of those holding positions of power.
In Birkenfeld’s case, at least he was able to get the last laugh: After he applied for whistleblower status following his release from prison, the IRS awarded him a settlement of $104 million through their Whistleblower Office.
Source: twitter.com
Lucifer’s Banker
Birkenfeld told his incredible story in his memoir, Lucifer’s Banker: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy (Austin, TX: Greenleaf Press, 2016), which is being made into a movie. See Birkenfeld’s website for more information. See also his updated second edition: Lucifer’s Banker Uncensored: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy (Alexandria, VA: Republic Book Publishers, 2020).
Birkenfeld writes that he has “lived the life of an Ian Fleming character, which was all about thrill and that’s a hunger that can get you buried.”[1]
Growing up in an upper middle-class home in Hingham, Massachusetts (his father was a neurosurgeon), Birkenfeld graduated from Norwich Military Academy in Vermont and then experienced his first taste of the corruption of the banking world working for State Street Bank and Trust Company in Boston, where he first became a whistleblower.
The father of the bank’s CEO, Marshall N. Carter, perhaps not coincidentally, had been Deputy Director of the CIA.
After getting an MBA degree, Birkenfeld started working for Credit Suisse, then Barclays and then the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), the largest Swiss banking institution and private bank in the world.
Serving as a director and head of business development for the American desk, Birkenfeld became UBS’s highest paid employee when he signed a multi-billionaire Russian émigré to the U.S., Igor Olenicoff, with the promise of helping him to evade paying taxes on much of his fortune.
Birkenfeld’s boss, Christian Bovay, conceived the scam that Birkenfeld participated in by which UBS would charge a three percent management fee to its wealthy clients in exchange for helping them to evade paying taxes by placing it securely in one of the bank’s secret off-shore accounts.
Birkenfeld would make clients more money by investing, often in weapons manufacturers. Then when the clients needed their money, UBS would lend it back at a reasonable interest rate.
Birkenfeld wrote in Lucifer’s Banker that “UBS was making a fee for holding the guy’s cash in the first place, then making another fee for loaning him his own damn money! And guess what? That guy’s happy! He’s getting his deal done, and he’s still doing it with tax-free cash! I couldn’t believe it, and you know what? It worked, over and over again.”[2]
Birkenfeld’s job was to travel to the U.S. frequently, to attend charity events and upscale social functions, and to woo wealthy new clients to the UBS Bank with an offer they couldn’t refuse.
