Yearly Archives: 2012

This story just in from Jamie Golombek.  Another dumbass American executive gets hit big-time by Mr. FBAR, but it’s hard to feel any sympathy – this guy was just asking for it:

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/business/story.html?id=bd1dcaf7-afce-48bf-8cc6-229b262c6b38

UPDATE:  My apologies to all – I only sporadically followed the site during my vacation in July and didn’t make the connection that this is a follow-up story to the ongoing Williams case, previously discussed here and here, and probably elsewhere. I’ll let my original gut response to the article stand (above) and just take my lumps, since the comments are shedding more useful light on the topic. Mea culpa – it’s not not easy being an amateur blogger sometimes!

 
The time has arrived to share a few details about one of my wellsprings of inspiration.

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RTS Radio Interview dated 8 August 2012:   http://www.rts.ch/audio/la-1ere/programmes/forum/4170924-qui-defend-encore-les-banques-suisses-08-08-2012.html

Interviewed were Antoine Spilmann, Member of the Committee of Swiss Respect (http://www.swissrespect.ch/index.php?id=21) as well as Charles Adams (Corporate Lawyer).

The header for the interview on the RTS website contained the following (quick human translation by me from the French in italics below):

Qui défend encore les banques suisses?   

Who still defends Swiss banks?

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Greg Miller – American Expat Chiang Mai

Many Americans look at the federal government as behaving like a criminal. The government seems  to easily break laws, the foremost law of the United States being the US Constitution, which is often completely disregarded by the Executive Branch (and it’s many agencies) and the US Congress. For instance, can the President start a war with another nation? Not according to the supreme law of the United States, the same document the President swore to God and the World he would protect and defend. And every politician in Congress made the same solemn oath.

But “governments becoming criminal” is not just a recent development. It may seem that way as America currently bullies the world into submission, and conduct shakedowns of the American public without warrant or any just cause. We can look back to the era of the Second World War in Europe and see plenty of criminal activities from governments on all sides of that conflict. But it goes back much further than that — it goes back to the very establishment of Western governments a millennium ago. (But it is not just a “Western” thing, it is universal). Perhaps even earlier. It is the nature of the beast. Governments, unless stopped, morph into criminal enterprises.

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Interesting article from the BBC today:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/19172065

Apparently the US claims jurisdiction over almost all banking transactions worldwide, because if a transaction is translated into US dollars, even for just a second (which apparently many unfortunately are), a US court has ruled that that is sufficient for the transaction to fall under US jurisdiction.

Other issues covered include Dodd-Frank, Standard Chartered bank, US anti-corruption laws claiming global jurisdiction, agressive US extradition requests (especially in the UK with its one-way extradition treaty with the US) and so on. The article doesn’t directly mention FATCA unfortunately, though it does mention the one-sided and completely unreciprocal US approach to regulating financial services.