Motorsports Icon Sentenced To 18 Months In Prison
By Daniel Gilbert, Reporter / Bristol Herald Courier
ABINGDON, Va. – As he was about to be sentenced Monday for federal income tax fraud, those in the courtroom stood up for Larry McClure.
Supporters of the motorsports icon filled the courtroom, which was too small to hold them. Family members, friends, giants of the stock car racing world – around 50 people– spilled into the hallway, sat on benches and stood shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with McClure and his family.
Junior Johnson, the fabled moonshiner-turned-dirt track racer and NASCAR team owner, turned out. Joy Stata, a Florida native, was there to support the man who put her hometown of Bartow on the racing map. Jeff Byrd, president of Bristol Motor Speedway, stood outside, having arrived too late to get a seat.
“How long do these things last?” Byrd wanted to know. He had never been to a federal court hearing.
Inside the courtroom of Judge James P. Jones, McClure made his last public mea culpa.
“I’d like to apologize to you, the court,” he told Jones, chief judge for the Western District of Virginia. “To the opposing counsel, to my family, my God. His will be done, whatever you decide.”
Jones’ decision ushered in a stunned silence, punctuated by sniffles: McClure will serve 18 months in prison, the low end of the sentencing range.
For McClure’s supporters, it was a crushing end to a three-year criminal investigation that has taken a toll on him personally and financially. McClure pleaded guilty in January to five counts of filing a false income tax return, obstructing the federal investigation and lying to Internal Revenue Service investigators.
In addition to the prison time, McClure was fined $40,000, ordered to reimburse the IRS $25,000 for its investigation, and to pay nearly $60,000 in restitution to Eastman-Kodak for filing a false invoice. He was also ordered to refile his personal income tax returns for 2002, 2003 and 2004.
During those years, McClure admitted to accepting $269,000 in cash payments from a friend in exchange for services provided by Morgan-McClure Motorsports, of which McClure is a part owner. He did not report the income to the corporation or on his personal tax returns, and owes the government just over $100,000.
“We all know anyone can have tax problems,” Jones said in delivering the sentence.
But McClure’s failure to pay was not based on a technicality, the judge said.
“It was an elaborate scheme to defraud. He cheated the honest taxpayer.”
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IRS says set to pursue “other banks” on tax evasion
By Tom Brown, Reuters.com
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is preparing to pursue other foreign banks for allegedly facilitating tax evasion by wealthy Americans following its high-profile case against Switzerland’s UBS AG, an IRS official said on Monday.
UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, in February acknowledged that it helped U.S. clients conceal assets from the U.S. government. It agreed to pay a $780 million fine and identify some of its American clients.
But U.S. authorities are still going after the Swiss bank, seeking to access the data of another 52,000 Americans they say are hiding about $14.8 billion in Swiss bank accounts.
“We are developing John Doe summonses on other banks,” Daniel Reeves, an agent with the IRS’ Offshore Compliance division, told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference in Miami on offshore finance.
He was referring to the kind of subpoena filed by the IRS against UBS seeking to force the bank to turn over the names of clients suspected of evading U.S. taxes.
Reeves declined to say which, or how many, other banks could face cases filed by the IRS, but he confirmed the entities being investigated were foreign-based like UBS.
“We have identified other offshore banks that are engaged in similar activities,” he earlier told the conference.
On April 2, U.S. authorities arrested and charged an accountant in Florida in the first of what they said could be a series of tax evasion prosecutions of American clients of UBS.
Almost two weeks later, a wealthy Florida yacht broker pleaded guilty to using an account with UBS to hide more than $3 million in assets from the U.S. government.
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US accountant granted bail in UBS tax case
By CURT ANDERSON, Associated Press
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — A wealthy accountant who is the first U.S. citizen charged in a wide-ranging tax probe of Swiss banking giant UBS AG was granted release from jail Wednesday on $12 million bail.
Federal prosecutor Jeffrey Neiman said the unusually large amount was necessary because of the high risk that Steven Michael Rubinstein might flee the country. Rubinstein, 55, is also a citizen of South Africa and owns a condominium in Israel in addition to his main home in Boca Raton
U.S. Magistrate Barry Seltzer also ordered Rubinstein to a dusk-to-dawn home curfew, wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet and travel only within South Florida. He agreed to surrender keys to a 45-foot boat docked outside his home and gave up his U.S. and South African passports.
Rubinstein is scheduled to enter a plea April 22 to charges of filing a false 2007 tax return by failing to disclose income from his UBS accounts, which carries a maximum three-year prison sentence. The Internal Revenue Service claims Rubinstein failed to report UBS income on his returns from 2001 to 2007, but he is only charged so far for the 2007 return.
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First Client From U.S. Is Arrested in UBS Case
By LYNNLEY BROWNING, The New York Times
Federal authorities have arrested a wealthy American client of the Swiss bank UBS on charges of tax evasion.
The client, Steven Michael Rubinstein, an accountant, was arrested in Boca Raton, Fla., and charged with one criminal count of filing a false and fraudulent tax return, according to court papers unsealed on Thursday.
The arrest is the first of an American client of UBS, which has been under criminal investigation for helping scores of wealthy Americans evade taxes through secret offshore accounts that went unreported to the Internal Revenue Service. It signals that federal authorities are making good on a promise to pursue American clients suspected of tax evasion, and in some cases to make indictments.
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I.R.S. to Ease Penalties for Some Offshore Tax Evaders
By Lynnley Browning, The New York Times
The Internal Revenue Service, under pressure to bring in money to the faltering economy, plans to give offshore tax evaders a big break.
The agency announced on Thursday a plan that lowers a penalty levied on wealthy Americans who stash billions of dollars overseas to evade taxes.
In another shift, the I.R.S. will generally not prosecute taxpayers who come forward voluntarily, provided they are not drug dealers, arms merchants or others with ill-gotten gains. And it will not assess a 35 percent penalty on money secretly transferred to foreign trusts - a common method of tax evasion.
The goal, Douglas Shulman, the I.R.S. commissioner, said during a briefing “is to get taxpayers who have been hiding assets offshore back into the system.”
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