Donna-Lane Nelson is a co-plaintiff with me in the Republicans Overseas U.S. FATCA/IGA/FBAR lawsuit.
The July 14, 2015 Complaint states that: “…Fearing that she would eventually not be able to bank in the country where she lived, she [Donna-Lane] decided to relinquish her U.S. citizenship. She did so on December 11, 2011 at the U.S. Consulate in Bern, Switzerland. The decision to relinquish her U.S. citizenship was not easy, but ultimately she felt that she had to choose between having the ability to access local financial services where she lived or be a U.S. citizen…”
Donna-Lane, a novelist, has published a murder mystery (“Murder in Schwyz“) which includes a description of the harm caused by FATCA:
“…At home, Brett’s marriage is in deep trouble, but he doesn’t want a divorce. He wants the best for his two daughters and he is also trapped because Swiss banks are closing the accounts of Americans. He has put every asset in his Swiss wife’s name. A divorce will leave him with nothing.”
A novel that includes FATCA harm is, I think, a first.
Now — Eric in Switzerland (see complete response below in comments) tells us about the Switzerland FATCA Fact:
“It might be a novel but it sure isn’t fiction.
I could write a short book myself about lives turned upside down here in Switzerland. My elderly parents (American father/ Swiss mother) had their account shut down for a time by UBS. My American sister who only lived in the US until she was eight years old and her successful French husband went through FATCA hell in Geneva until she renounced out of desperation on their lawyer’s advice. FATCA wanted her French husband to cough up “back taxes” for the sin of sharing an account with his American wife…but you guys know all this.
I’ve had friends lose their house mortage, credit card accounts etc. I know an American couple who lived and prospered here since 1972 and were forced to sell everything and retire in the US although they had prepared for years to retire in Switzerland. FATCA made that Swiss retirement totally impossible. They spent a small fortune trying before just giving up…
“The US used the carrot and the stick to force the IGA signing but really, in the end, all there was was the stick. The Swiss know this and they are very bitter.
I had lunch with my half-brother about two months ago. He is a very honest, wealthy, clever and hard working businessman based in Geneva. He’s mainly into real estate. He owns a dozen apartment buildings, restaurants, a tourist hotel near the Cornavin train station and who knows what else. He has never lived or worked in the US. He just turned seventy last July. So we were having lunch and he told me that he deeply resented having to fill out a new form for his bank stating that he had no dealings with any Americans in the form of partners,investors, etc. He told me that he called up his bank and said “what is this bullshit”!?. They just told him (politely of course) to fill it out and sign it or we’ll have to suspend all your banking activities until you do. They also said, again very politely, don’t get pissed at us and change banks because there’s no escape. All Swiss banks are doing this.
You can multiply this outrage by every single business account holder in Switzerland.
Oh congratulations Chuck Schumer D/NY. Oh job well done Charlie Rangel D/NY. Sterling idea there Carl Levin (ret.) D/MI. And finally, bravo mister president Barack Hussein Obama, you thick c%ç*. You have successfully pissed off the entire international business world and have made them puke at the very idea of getting an American “person” even remotely involved with their enterprise in any way, shape or form. Brilliant, just f&%*ing brilliant!
I am a proud US Navy veteran. I volunteered in 1974. The Navy launched my career in aviation maintenance which eventually took me all the way to working for Swissair. It makes me so sad to say that I never thought I would harbor so much hatred for my own country. It makes me cry to think that short sighted and insatiable greed has replaced every noble principle that America was originally founded on.”
The first FATCA novel?
Good on Donna-Lane Nelson putting some of this to paper in her new novel.
Unfortunately for those of us intimately affected with US-deemed US citizenship taxation taint, FATCA is not fiction.
when’s the hollywood movie coming out?
It might be a novel but it sure isn’t fiction.
I could write a short book myself about lives turned upside down here in Switzerland. My elderly parents (American father/ Swiss mother) had their account shut down for a time by UBS. My American sister who only lived in the US until she was eight years old and her successful French husband went through FATCA hell in Geneva until she renounced out of desperation on their lawyer’s advice. FATCA wanted her French husband to cough up “back taxes” for the sin of sharing an account with his American wife…but you guys know all this.
I’ve had friends lose their house mortage, credit card accounts etc. I know an American couple who lived and prospered here since 1972 and were forced to sell everything and retire in the US although they had prepared for years to retire in Switzerland. FATCA made that Swiss retirement totally impossible. They spent a small fortune trying before just giving up.
I cannot speak for other countries in Europe but the Swiss banks are enforcing FATCA with a rare zeal. I am almost prepared to believe that they are collectively saying “You bloody American bastards want FATCA, well then we’ll give you FATCA even if it means chasing every goddam US citizen out of the country.”
I’m half Swiss. I have Swiss uncles, aunt’s, cousins, nieces, nephews and a Swiss half-brother from my Swiss mom’s first marriage. I know the Swiss. I have lived and worked and married into Switzerland since 1985. The Swiss are polite but they are definitely not docile. Above all they hate being pushed around; especially like this, and especially when it’s a foreign power doing the pushing.
The US used the carrot and the stick to force the IGA signing but really, in the end, all there was was the stick. The Swiss know this and they are very bitter.
I had lunch with my half-brother about two months ago. He is a very honest, wealthy, clever and hard working businessman based in Geneva. He’s mainly into real estate. He owns a dozen apartment buildings, restaurants, a tourist hotel near the Cornavin train station and who knows what else. He has never lived or worked in the US. He just turned seventy last July. So we were having lunch and he told me that he deeply resented having to fill out a new form for his bank stating that he had no dealings with any Americans in the form of partners,investors, etc. He told me that he called up his bank and said “what is this bullshit”!?. They just told him (politely of course) to fill it out and sign it or we’ll have to suspend all your banking activities until you do. They also said, again very politely, don’t get pissed at us and change banks because there’s no escape. All Swiss banks are doing this.
You can multiply this outrage by every single business account holder in Switzerland.
Oh congratulations Chuck Schumer D/NY. Oh job well done Charlie Rangel D/NY. Sterling idea there Carl Levin (ret.) D/MI. And finally, bravo mister president Barack Hussein Obama, you thick c%ç*. You have successfully pissed off the entire international business world and have made them puke at the very idea of getting an American “person” even remotely involved with their enterprise in any way, shape or form. Brilliant, just f&%*ing brilliant!
I am a proud US Navy veteran. I volunteered in 1974. The Navy launched my career in aviation maintenance which eventually took me all the way to working for Swissair. It makes me so sad to say that I never thought I would harbor so much hatred for my own country. It makes me cry to think that short sighted and insatiable greed has replaced every noble principle that America was originally founded on.
The truth about FATCA, FBAR and US extraterritorial CBT reads like fiction – when I first discovered the degree of threat to myself and my Canadian family – simply based on my US birthplace, I could tell that no-one I told about it really believed me. It took the now historic IsaacBrockSociety event in Toronto in 2012 for my Canadian spouse to appreciate that I was not exaggerating or paranoid.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Somebody oughta write a book about it.
Congratulations ! It is very important that the world begins to grasp the truth of the evil that is FATCA and CBT and CRS. Writings such as these will help tremendously to spread the word.
The comment of “Eric in Switzerland” is an accurate and honest comment. He speaks of his “hatred” of America. He speaks of the Swiss hatred of America.
Well, look at this way: Were it not for the United States of America, Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats who have caused this, he would never know what pure hatred really is. He goes on to describe the “multiplier effect” of the hatred of America. No country (in the long run) can survive this level of hatred.
In fact, look at this way. The result of the Obama presidency is:
America’s number 1 export is “hatred of America”.
And these Homelanders are so stupid that they think:
“They hate us because they are jealous of our freedoms.”
@Badger
Rather than write a book, one could simply collect and consolidate your comments over the years.
@USCitizenAbroad, thanks, you’re far too kind. This is and continues to be an organic, collective project created by all of us, everyone here, reading and discussing and questioning and contending together. Greater than the sum of all our parts.
I don’t know how I would have survived all this without the support, information and resources at IBS. Funny to think that it is now almost 5 years since I first accidentally stumbled on IBS in desperate midnight searches – trying to cope and grapple with the horrible discovery that the US considered me a “UStaxableandpenalizableperson” “abroad” merely because of being born there over half a century ago – despite having left the US with my family as a toddler – and despite Canada having been my home for almost my whole life. The IBS author
Thank you again and always to the founders of IBS, the organizers of the FATCA forum and subsequent events, those maintaining, monitoring and authoring this website and all those posting and commenting – and all those behind the scenes, who have together made this such an incredible and still growing resource created collectively – one which has now been running since December 2011. And thank you always to all those who’ve made the ADCS lawsuit happen and funded it, and thank you to our brave plaintiffs.
History has and is being made here.
Good on Donnalane for her novel being published and volunteering herself a plaintiff in the US effort to repeal FATCA.
Thank you for sharing this. I do hope enough homelanders read the book and realise what the US is doing.
Donna-Lane: Will there be a perhaps less expensive paperback or e-book version? I’d love to read it, but the price, plus Amazon’s usurious overseas shipping rates to Asia-Pacific, make it daunting.
Fantastic. I do hope, though, that people realize IT’S TRUE & not a story!
This is terrific news and I love Eric in Switzerland’s response to it. May it fly off the shelves and get more Americans thinking about what their government has done.
“Amazon’s usurious overseas shipping rates to Asia-Pacific”
Amazon has free shipping and a discounted price, 3 yen off of the retail price. Unfortunately it’s out of stock.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/Murder-Schwyz-Third-Culture-Kid-Nelson/dp/1432832239/ref=sr_1_1?s=english-books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474925547&sr=1-1&keywords=Murder+in+Schwyz
“The employees, however, own enough stock to rebel. They put the popular marketing manager Brett Windsor, an American, in control.”
Didn’t the employees fire Windsor when they learned he was American?
@Norman Diamond: I guess Amazon has a fulfillment center in Japan. Amazon’s shipping to most Asian (and other) countries comes to close to $10, what with the “per order” and “per item” charges added together. And $25 (and no discount) is rather pricey for a thriller novel. I note that Donna-Lane Nelson has a series of novels out, all in hardcover, all priced well over $20. I suggest she would reach a far wider audience if she released $9.99 paperbacks and $2.99 e-books. I think I know whereof I speak. I have friends who write Asian-based thrillers for a living, and sell tens of thousands at a time (at $2.99)
Sorry, Donna-Lane, as much as I want to read it, I just won’t buy it for $25+. I badly want to see this book succeed, if only to implant the truth about FATCA into hundreds of thousands of heads. So if part of your motivation is to spread the message of FATCA harm through the mass medium of thriller fiction, you ought to give it away as a free e-book on Amazon, which will expand your audience ten-thousands-fold and also serve to promote the heck out of the rest of your series.
Sorry if I presume to tell you how to conduct your business. Nothing personal intended. Just offering feedback from a potential consumer.
“I guess Amazon has a fulfillment center in Japan.”
Yes. The web site is Amazon Japan after all.
“Amazon’s shipping to most Asian (and other) countries comes to close to $10”
For shipping from the US to Japan yes.
One time I bought a new book from Amazon US because Amazon US’s price for the US edition plus US$10 shipping was about half of Amazon Japan’s price for the UK edition with free shipping.
Several times I’ve bought used books from the Amazon US Marketplace and paid for shipping. One time I bought a book from the Amazon Canada Marketplace and paid for shipping. (Sellers on the Amazon Japan Marketplace usually charge for shipping but it didn’t matter when they didn’t have the book.)
I haven’t bought an e-book on Amazon. I hope they don’t charge for shipping ^_^
But speaking of e-books… Japanese companies complain that customers have to pay Japanese sales tax when downloading purchases from Japanese companies but don’t have to pay Japanese sales tax when downloading purchases from foreign companies. I think the government wants to do something similar to CRS for sales tax instead of income tax. That would be a very fair thing to do, wouldn’t it? But I could just imagine the US doing something similar to FATCA to make the US’s diaspora pay double sales tax.
Hey, I kind of understood when one comment was pending moderation because it contained a URL to Amazon’s site, but why another comment that just mentions Amazon Japan, Amazon US, and Amazon Canada without giving any URLs? Maybe I should mention that Rakuten bought a Canadian maker of e-books and see if this gets extra pending.
It appears that all comments are now being held for moderation. Is this to keep out trolls?
“It appears that all comments are now being held for moderation. Is this to keep out trolls?”
Can’t be. If it were, mine would never get posted ^_^
A couple of sites which I used to respect banned me. One of them even had a couple of articles about corruption in the IRS, but I guess they don’t know how extensive the problem is and they don’t believe me. Of course I wouldn’t have believed it either before it happened to me. Even when the IRS accidentally revealed a few details, at first I thought they had made mistakes, but as more revelations came out I figured out that the corruption was intentional. One site even banned me for mentioning Monica Hernandez, even after TIGTA reported her name and lots of news sites picked it up. TIGTA has reported about others too, but they still haven’t caught the ringleaders. Anyway, I guess some blog owners think I’m a troll because it’s hard to believe how extensive the corruption is.
Another suggestion (for those who can’t buy the book, or in addition to buying it): put in a purchase suggestion at your local public libraries.
@Eric in Switzerland
I agree with your assessment completely. The Swiss are angry. I feel reluctant to admit to them I have ever had any connection with the USA.
FATCA has also soured our relationship with our American friends and relatives who look at us with suspicion and anger when we tell them we are no longer citizens of ‘the greatest country in the world’.
We spent many days deciding whether to ‘confess’ to our deed before a four day visit from two close American friends. We did, and it was received with shock and disbelief tinged with anger. It took four days of explanation, and reading bbc, wsj, nyt articles before they even grasped the rudiments. It ruined their holiday and ours. These were people who had once lived in Italy and were considering moving abroad if Trump got it. I think reality finally dawned when they realised they didn’t have that choice. But who knows of they will ever view us in the same light anymore.
That gang of five have ruined lives and relationships, may they rot in hell.
Don’t worry. I wish my publisher would do paperback. There will be a kindle and someday there will be cheaper used books on Amazon.
He had no financial authority. That is usually when people are fired.