Swiss private banker questioned in US
A client advisor of the Swiss private Wegelin bank was questioned last year in the United States about attempted money laundering, a newspaper revealed on Sunday.
A spokeswoman for the bank confirmed to the Swiss news agency a report in the SonntagsZeitung newspaper that the man had been “lured into a trap” by the FBI in October 2010 when he was in Miami on his way to a congress in the Bahamas.
He admitted the attempted laundering to the investigators and was allowed to leave the country at the end of October.
The bank immediately dismissed him.
The spokeswoman said the Wegelin & Co “regretted” the case, and was looking into it with the Swiss financial markets watchdog, Finma.
Wegelin, which is based in the eastern city of St Gallen and is Switzerland’s oldest private bank, announced in 2009 that it was to stop doing business in the US.
It said at the time that new regulations could put Swiss banks in an “untenable position” and the danger of inadvertently making false declarations to the tax authorities was too great.
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