Ubs

The U.S. and Swiss governments and banking giant UBS indicated Sunday that they were seeking a settlement and asked a federal judge to delay high-stakes hearings on the Internal Revenue Service's effort to identify thousands of suspected U.S. tax evaders. The motion, filed in Miami less than 24 hours before the hearings were to begin today, sought postponement until Aug. 3 "to allow the two governments to continue their discussions seeking a resolution of this matter."

Switzerland said it would seize UBS data to prevent the U.S. Justice Department from pursuing a court order seeking the identities of 52,000 American customers of the bank in a crackdown on tax evaders. The U.S. effort to enforce a summons seeking the names would force UBS to violate Swiss laws barring disclosure of such data, the Swiss government said in a motion in federal court in Miami.

A government lawsuit filed Thursday seeks the identities of tens of thousands of possible U.S. tax cheats who hid billions of dollars in assets at the Swiss-based bank UBS. A defiant Swiss president pledged to maintain his country's bank secrecy laws. In the suit filed in Miami, the Obama administration wants UBS to turn over information on as many as 52,000 U.S. customers who concealed their accounts from the government in violation of tax laws.

Banking giant UBS has agreed to pay $780 million and turn over once-secret Swiss banking records to settle allegations that it conspired to defraud the U.S. government of taxes owed by big clients, federal officials said Wednesday. As part of the deal struck in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., UBS has made the unprecedented step of agreeing to immediately turn over to the U.S. government account information for U.S. customers of the Zurich, Switzerland-based bank's cross-border business.

Switzerland said it hadn't given the U.S. any data on Swiss-based accounts of UBS clients because a request for assistance hadn't been decided upon. UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, is being investigated in the U.S. over whether it helped customers dodge American taxes. Former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld pleaded guilty in June to helping a billionaire UBS customer evade U.S. taxes, saying he and his colleagues engaged in a variety of schemes to help U.S. clients conceal $20 billion in assets and evade tax laws.

An Orange County billionaire who pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return involving foreign banking accounts filed a lawsuit alleging that Swiss bank UBS duped him into skirting U.S. tax laws. Real estate developer Igor Olenicoff filed the lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, accusing the bank of telling him his fortune would be invested in accordance with U.S. tax laws, then hiding it in offshore entities.

Swiss banking giant UBS agreed to buy back nearly $20 billion in auction-rate securities from investors, a day after Citigroup Inc. reached a similar settlement with regulators for $7 billion as part of a wide-ranging investigation into the collapse of the market for the bond-like investments. UBS will repurchase all $18.6 billion of the securities it sold and pay a fine of $150 million as part of an investigation led by New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo into whether banks misled customers about the safety of the securities.

The legal battle over the mess in the market for so-called auction-rate debt escalated Thursday as New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo stepped into the fray. Cuomo alleged in a lawsuit that the global investment bank UBS pushed customers into auction-rate securities during the last year even though the market was crumbling and the firm's own executives were dumping their holdings. UBS and other brokerages pitched the securities as safe and easily redeemable, telling customers the investments were as liquid as money-market funds.

UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, said Friday that it expected its second-quarter results to be "at or slightly below break-even" because of a tax credit that would at least partly offset investment losses. The bank also said it wouldn't need to ask for more capital when it reported the results next month. Analysts had been expecting a second-quarter loss of as much as $4.9 billion from the bank that had been hammered by big losses related to the U.S. sub-prime lending crisis.