Swiss national Susanne Rüegg Meier admitted in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia to participating in a wide-ranging scheme to help Americans conceal assets and income in offshore accounts.
Rüegg Meier told prosecutors that she “knew, or had reason to know, that many of her US clients used their accounts at Credit Suisse to evade their US income taxes”, according to the statement by the US Department of Justice.
Defrauding behaviour
Prosecutors said that from 2002 through 2011, while working as head of the Zurich team of Credit Suisse’s North American desk in Switzerland, Rüegg Meier oversaw the servicing of accounts for over 1,000 to 1,500 client relationships.
Among the action she took to assist many US clients in using their Credit Suisse accounts to evade their income taxes, Rüegg Meier:
- retained in Switzerland all mail related to the account;
- structured withdrawals in the forms of multiple checks, each payable in amounts less than $10,000 (£7,700, €8,650) that were sent by courier to clients in the United States; and
- arranged for US customers to withdraw cash from their Credit Suisse accounts at Credit Suisse locations outside Switzerland, such as the Bahamas.
Moreover, Rüegg Meier admitted that approximately 20 to 30 of her US clients “concealed their ownership and control of foreign financial accounts by holding those accounts in the names of nominee tax haven entities or other structures that were frequently created in the form of foreign partnerships, trusts, corporations or foundations”, the statement read.
She was also personally responsible for the accounts of 140 to 150 clients, almost all of which were US citizens, which held about $400m (£308m, €343m) in assets under management.
According to the Justice Department, Rüegg Meier admitted that the tax loss resulting from her criminal conduct could be determined in a range of between $3.5m to $9.5m.
$1m withdrawal
After Credit Suisse began closing US customers’ accounts in 2008, Rüegg Meier also helped clients keep their assets tucked away by recommending a few clients to open new accounts and transferring their assets to other banks, such as Bank Frey and Wegelin & Co.
In one case, the Justice Department said, Rüegg Meier helped a customer hide his assets even after Credit Suisse closed his account.
She helped him withdraw about $1m in cash and advised the client to find another bank “by walking along the street in Zurich and locating a bank that would be willing to open an account”, according to the prosecutors.
The customer placed the cash in a paper bag and left the bank, the Justice Department said.
Request for cooperation
The US Federal Reserve barred Meier from the banking sector in May 2015 alongside four other former Credit Suisse staffers, after they were indicted in 2011 for their role in the tax-dodging scheme.
Three other people charged with Rüegg Meier have come to the US to plead guilty, choosing to resolve their criminal cases rather than have them hang over their heads indefinitely. Each avoided prison and was sentenced to probation, Bloomberg reported.
Rüegg Meier, who now faces as many as five years in prison, will face the same fate when she is sentenced on 8 September.
The disgraced offshore banker agreed to “cooperate fully and truthfully with the United States and provide all information known to the defendant regarding any criminal activity as requested by the government”, according to the plea agreement she signed.
Credit Suisse, meanwhile, pleaded guilty in 2014 to a criminal charge for its own role in the tax evasion scheme and agreed to pay $2.6bn in a deal with American authorities.
A spokesman for the Swiss bank said in a statement that the lender “resolved this matter back in 2014,” declining to comment further.
