Julius Baer whistleblower to 'Tell-All' at OffshoreAlert Conference
By OffshoreAlert, January 27, 2010
Former offshore private banker Rudolf Elmer will 'tell-all' about his experiences as a Bank Julius Baer whistleblower in an appearance at this year's OffshoreAlert conference in May.
Elmer has agreed to talk openly and frankly about what he believes is the bank's complicity in global tax evasion by its clients and go into the reasons that made him offer client-records to the world's tax authorities.
"Whistleblowing should not be a money-making business but, today, it has to be because a whistleblower will not find another reasonable job after having told the truth to society," Elmer told OffshoreAlert.
"Society turns the whistleblower into an outlaw and leaves him or her with little choice in terms of providing for himself or herself financially."
For 16 years, Elmer worked for Bank Julius Baer, first in Switzerland, where he was a Senior Auditor from 1987 to 1994, and then in the Cayman Islands, where he was the group's local Chief Operating Officer from 1994 to 2003.
Now living in his native Switzerland, Elmer describes offshore tax evasion as "the biggest theft among societies and neighbour states in this world".
"If I had not worked in eight well-known Offshore Financial Centers and finally in Africa, I would not have discovered the biggest predatory theft in history of humanity and its catastrophic consequences for the poorest people of the earth," he told OffshoreAlert.
"The people of this world demand fair play in sport, why do they not demand this also from the financial institutions and multi-national conglomerates which maintain dubious companies in OFCs simply to evade or avoid paying their fair share of taxes in their homeland?"
Elmer denies that he is anti-offshore and says that OFCs can have a prosperous future but only if they change their business model, concentrating more on "excellence in professional performance" and less on "secrecy".
"As more and more practitioners are realizing, bank secrecy belongs in the past," he said. "Banks have to decide where privacy ends and social responsibility starts." Offering products and services that appeal to those with a lack of ethics or morals was not the way forward for OFCs, he said.
Whistleblowing is one of the main themes of the 8th Annual OffshoreAlert Financial Due Diligence Conference, which will take place at The Ritz-Carlton, South Beach in Florida on May 2-4, 2010.
Apart from Elmer, Allen Stanford whistleblower Charles Rawl will also be speaking, as will Washington, DC-based attorney Jack Blum, who represents Elmer and LGT Bank whistleblower Heinrich Kieber, and Eric Havian, an attorney with California-based law firm Phillips & Cohen, which specializes in whistleblower cases.
Register Now to reserve your seat and attend this and 28 other unique sessions presented by industry experts from the world's top organizations.
The premier educational & networking event about Offshore Financial Centers & Serious Financial Crime
Covering Fraud, Tax Evasion, Corruption, Money Laundering, Compliance, Intelligence-Gathering, Investigations, Asset Recovery, Trusts, Foundations, Hedge Funds, Special Purpose Vehicles, Tax Planning Strategies & Business-Friendly Legislation.
New for 2010:
- Current Trends in The World's Major OFCs
- Understanding Why Corporations Use OFCs
- Fraud-Victim Class Actions
- Emerging Areas for Whistleblowers (with the attorney for LGT Bank whistleblower Heinrich Kieber)
- America's Home-Bred OFCs – Delaware, Nevada & Wyoming: Their role in eastern European tax evasion
And there's so much more. You will learn everything you need to know about …
- How to prevent and detect Serious Financial Crime.
- How to Locate, Freeze and Seize the proceeds of fraud and other crimes.
- How to Investigate and Gather Intelligence in offshore centers.
- How to better understand Complex Financial Structures, Investments & Tax Issues.
- How to Comply with existing – and sometimes conflicting – laws in multiple countries.
