Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Feds arrest in case where only .01% chance of getting caught

At least that's what the defendant put the odds at in this UBS case (via the AP):

A former banker at Switzerland's UBS AG has been charged with tax fraud conspiracy for allegedly helping a wealthy U.S. client hide assets from the Internal Revenue Service.

Banker Renzo Gadola was named in the charging document filed Tuesday in Miami federal court. The document claims that Gadola and an unnamed second Swiss banker helped an unidentified Mississippi man hide an account at UBS and open another secret account at a second Swiss bank.

Gadola worked at UBS for 13 years, then in early 2009 began working as an independent investment adviser.

Prosecutors say Gadola and the other banker tried to prevent the client from disclosing his secret accounts to the IRS. During a November meeting at a Miami hotel, according to court documents, Gadola told the client the likelihood that his new accounts would be discovered was "practically zero percent."

"You have no link to UBS whatsoever, so 99.9 percent you have nothing to worry about," Gadola told the client, according to court documents.


Speaking of other things that happen only .01% of the time, a federal appellate court today ruled in favor of a criminal defendant in a Fourth Amendment case. And it was a biggie. Orin Kerr from Volokh has all the details of United States v. Warshak from the 6th Circuit, where the court held that email is protected by the warrant clause of the 4th Amendment. That almost deserves an !. (Hat tip: JK).

3 comments:

  1. doesn't 99.9 from 100 leave 0.1, not .01. That's one-tenth v. one, one hundreth, or 1/10 v. 1/100. So, doesn't it happen 1/10 of the time, not 1/100? I know, you're a lawyer, not a math wiz. Sorry for ragging on you.

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  2. Anonymous9:01 PM

    Sorry, but your no math wiz either. .1 is not 1/10, it is 1/10 of 1. By saying that it happens 1/10 of the time, that means that it happens 1 out of 10 times or 10%.

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  3. You can kind of see one's motivation to hide US assets from the IRS seeing as how the federal government is on pace to continue rampaging through our collective wallets and going into spending frenzies. I do see why one would be arrested for that though.

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