When former UBS private banker Bradley Birkenfeld asked Stephen Kohn for help in applying to the Internal Revenue Service’s whistle-blower award program in September 2009, he could hardly have been in a deeper legal hole. A month before, Birkenfeld had been sentenced to 40 months in prison10 months more than prosecutors had recommendedafter he pled guilty to conspiring to help a client, Igor Olenicoff, evade U.S. taxes.
Birkenfeld was no one’s idea of an angel. (In their statement of fact, prosecutors said that he once smuggled a client’s diamonds out of the country in a toothpaste tube.) They asserted that after years of helping rich Americans hide their assets at UBS’s private banking unit, Birkenfeld blew the whistle only after he learned that his client was being investigated for tax fraud, and that he himself would be implicated.
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