When his decidedly premature obituary had been mistakenly published in The New York Journal, Mark Twain responded: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
I was reminded of this famous quotation after reading an article in the June issue of that estimable journal, Offshore Investing, entitled "The Death of Offshore Secrecy – and it’s not resting in peace," by the dynamic father and son duo of Howard S. Fisher, Esq., and Alexander J. Fisher, JD/MBA. Fisher senior is a well known California asset protection attorney and Fisher fils appears to be a candidate for the bar.
If sheer length (9 pages of small print) and abundance of footnotes (52 in all) could prove a point, their conclusion -- financial "secrecy is dead" -- might have some validity. But while their writing would make an interesting law school term paper, it fails to prove their point -- and surely, in my opinion, it takes a far too gloomy view of the future of bank secrecy and financial privacy in general.
With troops like this supposedly defending financial freedom, one has to question the ultimate victory.
Dead Beat Crook
The authors place much blame for their suggested demise of all the world's bank secrecy on the alleged UBS bank scandal, (allegedly helping Americans to evade taxes), and on one Heinrich Kieber, who is said to be living under a new name in an undisclosed "witness protection program." (Since he is wanted by Interpol and Liechtenstein police for grand theft and violation of bank secrecy laws, one must ask what sort of witness protection system protects a wanted criminal from the police?)
You may recall that it was the now very wealthy Herr Keiber that conned the German secret police agency, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), (equivalent of the U.S. CIA), to pay him a €5 million, (US$7.3 million) bribe. This fraudster, dead beat debtor and disgruntled ex-employee of LGT Bank in Liechtenstein gave the BND a list of Germans allegedly with accounts at the LGT bank, "Exhibit A" in the current supposed offshore tax evasion melee.
This Fishers' article is an historic tour de force of various past ex-bank employee rascals who have stolen information, then used it to their advantage -- and to the disadvantage of their employers and 
assorted bank clients. In each case a single individual has been responsible for breaching offshore bank secrecy laws, and the stolen information was used to prosecute errant taxpayers, their advisors, and in the instant case, has led to the investigation of several banks, and the indictment and guilty plea of a former senior executive of UBS.
Purveyors of Gloom
Admittedly there are other doomsayers when it comes to the future of financial privacy, (which, since the PATRIOT Act, is dead in America).
"Nothing is secret anymore," says Cono Namorato, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, D.C. and a former official at the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Justice Department. "No individual should take any comfort in relying on any country's so-called bank-secrecy laws." Might his former employment make him a wee bit prejudice?
Teodoro Cocca, formerly with Zurich University's Swiss Banking Institute, and now a professor at the Johannes Kepler Institute in Linz, Austria, last month told Swissinfo concerning the leftist reaction to the UBS tax evasion mess: "This is a direct and coordinated attack on the heart of the Swiss financial system. This is a long-term threat that will not go away, and there is not too much Switzerland can do."
Echoing what I have said for years, Cocca does admit that the U.S. tax investigations are part of a coordinated and cntinuing attack on Swiss and offshore banking practices. The professor, joining the gloom, believes that the U.S. and European Union countries have launched an "unstoppable attack" on tax havens.
Premature Surrender
The problem with all these seemingly expert nay sayers predicting the demise of bank secrecy is that they are, perhaps unwittingly, surrendering and accepting the dangerously wrong premise of the Far Left -- that financial privacy per se equates with tax evasion. Or with drug lords. Or with terrorists. Or with crooks of all sorts.
In fact, financial and personal privacy is a basic human right that no government has a right to violate without probable cause and due process. Certainly there is no legal or logical justification for the wholesale indictment of everyone who chooses to do business offshore -- but that is exactly what is happening.
Right now, as the law stands in most, if not all, tax havens, there are established legal and judicial procedures available to pursue illegal financial activities by bank account holders -- and that includes tax evasion.
Mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs) and tax information exchange treaties (TIEAs), including those with Switzerland and Liechtenstein, can be, and have been used by the United States to pursue alleged criminals. There also are abundant U.S. laws that can (and do) serve as the basis for criminal prosecution for non-reporting of offshore accounts and income.
The Battle Continues
Even if UBS is willing to abandon its American customers to the IRS, I suspect that official Switzerland and other sovereign offshore financial centers are going to stand and fight for their basic bank secrecy laws -- laws that have been revised and updated to accommodate reasonable law enforcement requirements.
There is every reason for prudent caution and stout defense, but no reason for excessive gloom -- unless one is willing to run up the white flag and surrender the last of our freedoms -- or unless, of course, you are trying to write an eye-catching article with a sexy headline.
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