Today, after a long and protracted battle between the U.S. and Swiss government, Swiss bank UBS AG agreed to turn over the names of at least 4,450 U.S. holders of accounts in Switzerland who may have violated U.S. tax laws. While the Obama administration may paint this as a victory, this number is less than 10 percent of the 52,000 names it had originally asked for. It is even lower than the estimate of 5,000 to 10,000 names that news reports speculated…

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Lawyers for the U.S. government and the Swiss bank UBS AG have announced that they have reached a deal on releasing to the US the names of UBS account holders. No new details of the agreement have been released, other than what was previously speculated on a week ago.

I will be watching for and examining details that are released. Whatever deal is reached, the Obama administration’s conduct in the case, disregarding both privacy interests and the sovereignty of other nations, has…

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Today, Wall Street Journal reports that a Miami court has set meeting Friday between the IRS and UBS to look at where they are in settlement negotiations over the case of the IRS demanding that the Swiss bank turn over the names of more then 50,000 U.S. citizens alleged to be tax evaders.

As I have said in past posts on this issue (in which I have been admittedly hard on UBS-but with a purpose), and as UBS seems to now be reiterating, turning…

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Your LibertyWeek hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist welcome you back with a rousing discussion of the much-debated Stimulus to Nowhere and the website where you can evaluate it, StimulusWatch.org. We get an update from the billionaire’s club known as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and then lament the lack of income tax integrity among President Obama’s cabinet nominees in Scandal Watch: Daschle Edition. Finally, you can put this Olympic News in your pipe and smoke it.

Listen here. Also, thanks…

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Last week, the German government said that Switzerland should be placed on the international blacklist for tax havens. Really? That is, according to Peer Steinbruck (German finance minister):

Speaking to reporters in Paris after a conference on measures to combat tax avoidance, Steinbrück said Switzerland deserved to be on the list being drawn up by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development because Swiss investment conditions encouraged some German taxpayers to commit fraud.

The French budget minister, Eric Woerth, even raised the prospect of ‘retaliatory measures’…

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As yesterday’s New York Times reports. Lost in the universal focus on the credit crisis, we have seen a somewhat troubling change taking place in Switzerland’s longtime bank secrecy laws.

Switzerland’s tax authorities, under pressure from a growing United States investigation into the Swiss bank giant UBS, are expected to hand over confidential data on wealthy American clients of UBS to the Justice Department, two people briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

The move would represent a significant shift in Switzerland’s banking…

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