UBS client to fight handover of bank file to US

An American customer of UBS AG will ask a Swiss court to stop his account details from being handed over to U.S. authorities probing alleged tax evasion, his lawyer said Monday.

Thomas Fingerhuth said his client has been given 30 days to challenge the decision of the Swiss federal tax office to surrender his entire file to U.S. investigators, who are examining whether Switzerland's largest bank helped rich Americans dodge their tax obligations.

The case will test Switzerland's strict banking secrecy rules, which have come under sustained pressure from the United States, France and Germany in the wake of several high-profile tax evasion probes — including against UBS customers.

"It's my contention that the documents were compiled illegally, and therefore cannot be surrendered or used in America, where the rules on permissible evidence are much stricter than in Switzerland anyway," Fingerhuth told The Associated Press by telephone from Zurich.

Several other UBS clients are preparing similar cases, but this was the first, he said.

"In my client's case, it's not about a crazy amount of money," Fingerhuth said. "But I have a feeling that they want to push through one case to see how it goes, and then follow through with the others."

Andreas Rued, a Zurich-based lawyer representing another of UBS's American clients, said the request U.S. authorities sent to the Swiss tax office on July 17 constituted an illegal "fishing expedition" because it lacked specific evidence of wrongdoing by individuals but rather hoped to find a few tax evaders by obtaining information on all customers.

The Swiss tax office declined to comment on the grounds that legal proceedings in the matter were still ongoing.

Fingerhuth declined to identify his client, a retired U.S. citizen, but he said he will also file a criminal complaint against UBS for handing the documents over to Swiss authorities in the first place, in breach of Switzerland's banking secrecy laws.

Earlier this month a senior UBS executive was charged in the U.S. with conspiring to hide $20 billion in assets from the Internal Revenue Service.

The indictment charges that from 2002 and 2007, Raoul Weil, as chief of UBS's wealth management business, helped about 20,000 U.S. clients conceal assets in offshore accounts. About 17,000 of the customers hid their identities and their Swiss bank accounts from the IRS and many of them filed false income tax returns.

Calls placed to UBS in Zurich were not immediately returned. The bank has said in the past that it is cooperating with U.S. authorities on the tax evasion investigation.

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Associated Press Writer Balz Bruppacher contributed to this report from Bern.

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