Switzerland fines Renzo Gadola for handing bank account data to the US
A former banker at UBS has been found guilty of handing over protected Swiss bank account data to the US, according to a penalty order issued by the Swiss prosecutors’ office.
According to the order, the banker was found to have breached Swiss data privacy laws but not its banking secrecy laws, which United States authorities have long tried to penetrate in their pursuit of suspected tax evaders.
A lawyer for banker Renzo Gadola declined to comment.
Gadola, who worked at UBS from 1995 to 2009, pleaded guilty in the US in 2010 to conspiring to defraud the US Internal Revenue Service and in 2011 was sentenced to five years’ probation and fined US$100.
But Gadola began working with US officials almost immediately after his arrest in 2010, providing insight into other bankers and Swiss institutions offering offshore banking services, according to prosecutors in 2011.
As a result, Switzerland’s prosecutor said in November last year that it was investigating Gadola. He was found guilty under protected data laws of handing over two sets of bank account information to the US authorities.
Gadola was fined 6,000 Swiss francs (HK$48,800) suspended pending two years probation, and ordered to cover the legal fees of the trial, estimated at 7,117 francs for breaching the Swiss law of economic espionage.
But he escaped harsher penalties as prosecutors failed to prove a second charge of violating the Swiss banking secrecy laws, an offence which is punishable by up to three years in prison and a fine of up to 250,000 francs.
Gadola was spared under the banking secrecy laws because he was not employed by the bank from which the clients’ data stemmed.
The penalty was first reported on Sunday by Swiss newspaper Schweiz am Sonntag.
In the document prosecutors said Gadola’s crime did “not weigh heavily”, since he handed over only two sets of data.
The US obtained other information from Gadola through forceful means, in confiscating his laptop, his smartphone, and work documents in 2010, according to the penalty order.
