Tax Evasion

Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, founders of luxe Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana, will go on trial in December for tax evasion. The pair are accused of carefully dodging taxes by selling their business in 2004 to a Luxembourg-based holding company, Gado Srl, that they actually created in order to evade higher corporate taxes in their home country of Italy, according to Women's Wear Daily. An investigation into the designers by Italian police began in 2008. Another probe was also launched into the company itself for alleged tax irregularities.

A former investment banker at Lazard Freres & Co. pleaded guilty today to felony criminal charges in the Dennis Levine insider trading scheme that could earn him up to 20 years in prison, according to the U.S. attorney's office. Robert Wilkis, 37, who had also been a first vice president at E. F. Hutton & Co., pleaded guilty in U.S.

The owner of a roofing removal company in Ojai was indicted on four counts of tax evasion Friday, authorities said. Assistant U.S. Atty. Ronald Cheng said that for the tax years 1990 through 1993, Gunther Rolf Holler, 63, of Ojai, owner of Valley Construction Services, filed false tax returns. An investigation by the IRS found that despite having gross receipts totaling more than $1.

A Santa Ana man was charged Monday with two felony counts of tax evasion for allegedly failing to report nearly $1 million in income over a two-year period and, thus, avoiding $362,131 in taxes, according to the U.S. attorney's office. John P. Reilly, 47, an independent electrical contractor, was charged in an Internal Revenue Service criminal investigation that stemmed from a civil audit of his one-man contracting business.

The news today that Lauryn Hill has pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges still leaves much to mystery, such as exactly how and why Hill felt pressure to recede from public view and opt not to release the bounty of material she has supposedly amassed over the last decade. The tax issue at least appears to have some closure. Hill today admitted that she failed to file tax returns from 2005 to 2007, according to the Associated Press . The amount earned over that three-year period is more than $1.5 million, and Hill faces a maximum prison sentence of three years, one year for each count.  The AP wrote that Hill was "dressed in a dark jacket, white button-up shirt and a long reddish-orange skirt," adding that she declined to comment after the hearing in New Jersey.

PARIS - France and Germany have launched a series of raids on the offices and homes of bank officials and their wealthy customers in an ongoing inquiry aimed at cracking down on those who evade taxes by using Swiss banks. On Tuesday, German police searched the homes of an unspecified number of Credit Suisse bank customers suspected of tax evasion. In France, detectives raided the offices of Swiss banking and finance house UBS in three major cities: Lyon, Bordeaux and Strasbourg.

A former major league baseball player living in Newport Beach was sentenced to five years' probation Friday after pleading guilty in Santa Ana to tax evasion and trying to bribe an auditor in connection with his 1999 state returns. Dennis Ribant, 62, who pitched six seasons for the New York Mets, was also ordered to pay $102,000 in back taxes and court costs as well as perform 50 hours of community service, according to a state Franchise Tax Board spokesman.

When several Beverly Hills investors told stories of being conned by a suave, heavy-set man who claimed to be former Mexican President Vicente Fox's brother in media reports a few years ago, a sternly-worded notice appeared on the man's website. "Just as power abhors a vacuum, modern journalism apparently abhors any type of due diligence and fact checking before scurrilous allegations are repeated as fact," said the notice posted on the "official site" of Alfredo Trujillo Fox, threatening legal action against his accusers.