On August 16, 2013, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that Edgar Paltzer, a former partner at a Swiss law firm, pled guilty to conspiring with US taxpayers and others to help US taxpayers hide millions of dollars from the IRS in offshore accounts, and to evade US taxes on the income earned in those accounts. He faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison, and is scheduled to be sentenced on February 21, 2014. According to the Superseding Information and Indictment, Paltzer conspired with US taxpayers and others to ensure that their clients could hide their Swiss bank accounts and the income generated there from the IRS. Paltzer, acting as a financial intermediary, helped US taxpayers maintain undeclared assets in Swiss banks by, among other things, working with US taxpayers to create and maintain sham foundations and other entities to nominally hold the US taxpayers' accounts in Swiss banks. After certain Swiss banks required that these US taxpayers close their accounts, Paltzer assisted these US taxpayers and others to move their accounts to other Swiss banks that were willing to maintain accounts for US taxpayers. It was further reported that Paltzer helped repatriate funds to the US taxpayers from their undeclared accounts in Switzerland designed to avoid detection from US authorities. Co-defendant, Stefan Buck, a Swiss citizen and former head of private banking at Zurich-based Bank Frey, has not yet been arrested.
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