UBS Debacle: From Switzerland To Stamford

August 27, 2009 (posted on Advocate website 8/27/09)

Dear Editor,

When it comes to the recent UBS tax evasion controversy, it's interesting to see how what happens on the national level finds local expression. While Obama played golf in Martha's Vineyard with UBS executive Robert Wolf, after the settlement regarding UBS' aiding thousands of American tax evaders, Bradley Birkenfeld, the UBS insider who blew the whistle, lost his freedom for 40 months and his standing in the Swiss banking community--even as his own millionaire client only got probation. Another puzzle: while the IRS will investigate 4,450 millionaires with UBS accounts, Birkenfeld originally submitted 52,000 to the U.S. authorities. Will any action be taken against them?

The contradiction is obvious: how can U.S. courts on the one hand condemn one party for illegal activity, yet simultaneously condemn another for bringing it to their attention? Feeling cornered, it's as if the government resents exercising its lawful authority, and is making an example of Birkenfeld, so it won't have to call organizations like UBS to account in future.

When it comes to big business, Stamford seems to suffer from a similarly accommodating attitude. Twenty years past, when corporations first came to define the city's character, they demanded a variety of concessions under threat that they would leave. Though Stamford held the upper hand, it gave in.

When it first came to town in 2006, UBS was welcomed as a prestigious harbinger of new business and employment for Stamford. Enjoying a tax abatement and subsequent office expansion, it is now laboring under the weight of not just this scandal, but the stigma of having written down more than $18 billion in exposure to sub-prime loans, with job losses in the thousands in the offing. Pegging the vitality of a community to the unexamined mystique of multi-national businesses that have no lasting stake in it makes no sense in the long run. While, in more manageable proportions, corporate presence in any town can be part of a healthy socio/economic mix, an authentic, more resilient strength (especially during a period of economic upheaval) comes from a renewed emphasis on locally/regionally-based commerce.

Rolf Maurer
Green Party Candidate for Mayor