Top Business News

MIAMI (Reuters) – A father-and-son team of Miami-based property developers was sentenced to 10 eld in slammer on weekday for failing to inform more than $49 million of income in a housing that marked the first trial since the move of an intensified U.S. crackdown on offshore set evasion.

Mauricio Cohen and his son, metropolis Cohen Levy, both clients of HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe's maximal bank, were blameable in Oct of using shell entities and offshore set havens to hide tens of jillions of dollars from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

A federal judge in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, bimanual downbound the sentence.

The sentencing came individual months after U.S. polity ended their enquiry of Switzerland's UBS AG, which admitted serving thousands of wealthy Americans evade taxes finished offshore accounts.

Since the deciding of the UBS case, the U.S. government has said it would pursue another banks if it found kindred wrongdoing and last year dispatched letters to some HSBC clients, notifying them that they were targets of a malefactor probe.

Previous set mercantilism cases, after UBS became the pore of U.S. efforts to crack downbound on financial firms serving Americans hide income, hit ended in appeal agreements, officials say.

The Cohens, who owned and operated individual hotels low the Flatotel brand, were inactive in New royalty in Apr and after found blameable of conspiring to defraud the United States and filing simulated set returns.

According to suite documents, the Cohens' crimes included failing to clear taxes on the understanding of a New royalty hotel over 10 eld past that generated proceeds of $33 million.

Most of the money was eventually routed finished slope accounts belonging to tax-haven shell companies supported in the Bahamas, Panama and another locations, and the income was never reported on U.S. set returns by the Cohens or any of their related businesses or entities, prosecutors said in documents presented in the case.

The Cohens also stole and utilised the identities of unwitting employees and relatives to unstoppered and control accounts using their names, prosecutors said.

At the instance of their arrest, the Cohens told polity they had combined assets of meet over $15,000.

"The defendants hit serviceable the falsity that they are poor and not indebted to clear United States taxes," a suite writing presented by the prosecution said.

"They reassert this falsity despite experience in multimillion dollar homes, dynamical wealth vehicles, vacationing on yachts, getting finished traffic in a helicopter and existence chauffeured in a limousine," it said.

(Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

Source