Florida man charged with hiding assets through UBS
— -- A Florida accountant has become the first U.S. citizen accused of hiding assets from the IRS after Swiss banking giant UBS gave federal authorities the names of some secret account owners.
Steven Michael Rubinstein, 55, was arrested Thursday at his Boca Raton home and charged with filing a false income tax return. Rubinstein, an employee of an international yacht firm, was ordered detained pending a bond hearing Tuesday.
U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta said the charges resulted from UBS' February agreement to turn over names of some account holders suspected of illegally using Swiss bank accounts for tax fraud.
The bank turned over identities for American owners of as many as 300 accounts as part of a deferred-prosecution agreement after acknowledging it helped U.S. clients set up accounts in the names of sham entities.
"Today is the first of the prosecutions resulting from that disclosure, but it will not be the last," Acosta said. "It is our duty to those who pay their legal share of taxes to ensure that others do not use offshore schemes to evade payment of their taxes."
Rubinstein's Miami attorney, Robert Panoff, did not return messages seeking comment.
An affidavit by IRS Special Agent Scott Johnson says Rubinstein opened UBS accounts under the name of Hybridge International, a British Virgin Island corporation started in 2001.
From 2001 to 2008, Rubinstein used the accounts to deposit and sell more than $2 million in South African Krugerrand gold coins and buy securities worth more than 4.5 million Swiss francs, the affidavit says.
He also allegedly routed more than $3 million from UBS accounts to HSBC accounts in Monaco and New York, and then used the funds for the property purchase and construction of his Florida home.
Federal tax law requires Americans to file tax returns that report worldwide income and disclose any foreign accounts they control and that contain $10,000 or more in assets. Rubinstein failed to disclose his UBS account holdings to the IRS from 2001 to 2007, the IRS affidavit charged.
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