Donald Trumps Labor Secretary Pick Andrew Puzder Owes Millions To UBS As Bank Seeks Waiver From San
Source: IBT
President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Labor personally owes millions of dollars to a convicted bank that is relying on the same department to waive sanctions for its crimes, according to federal records. The ties between Trump’s embattled appointee Andrew Puzder and the multinational bank UBS were listed in federal documents reviewed by International Business Times -- but they were not explicitly acknowledged in Puzder’s ethics agreement with federal regulators.
“This was a very thorough process that closely analyzed every aspect of Mr. Puzder’s holdings and satisfied the Office of Government Ethics’ rigorous standards for resolving potential conflicts of interest,” said George Thompson, a spokesperson for Puzder, in an email response to questions from IBT. “OGE has been intimately involved in the details of Mr. Puzder’s financial disclosure report and his ethics agreement. If there were deficiencies or omissions in the information provided in the report, they would have been picked up by the OGE.”
In financial disclosure forms filed late last week, Puzder listed two mortgages and one line of credit with UBS Financial Services, an investment in UBS Dynamic Alpha Fund and 10 other accounts with UBS. In all, Puzder listed a total of between $2.6 million and $11.5 million of investments and loans with UBS. That is in addition to the millions of dollars of assets in the 10 other UBS accounts held by Puzder.
In 2009, UBS admitted to the Justice Department that it had “participated in a scheme to defraud the United States” by helping customers evade taxes. In 2015, UBS plead guilty to manipulating interest rates in violation of a previous deferred prosecution agreement. The case -- in which prosecutors determined the bank engaged in “ deceptive currency trading and sales practices” -- could trigger federal prohibitions designed to prevent convicted banks from managing billions of dollars of workers’ pension money.
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Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/donald-trumps-labor-secretary-pick-andrew-puzder-owes-millions-ubs-bank-seeks
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