Swiss Bank Whistleblowers Take Their Show on the Road

ZURICH—What does HSBC whistleblower Hervé Falciani think about the recent media storm he helped kick up for the bank? And what’s new with Bradley Birkenfeld, the American who blew the whistle on UBS and helped start the broader, ongoing U.S. legal crackdown on Swiss banks? Both may answer those questions and more when they kibbitz on a panel at a conference scheduled for early May.

Messrs. Falciani and Birkenfeld will appear together on what’s being billed as a “super panel” at the OffshoreAlert Conference in Miami Beach, entitled “Inside the UBS & HSBC Leaks.”

Mr. Falciani, a former employee at HSBC’s Swiss bank, handed details about the unit’s alleged aiding of tax evasion among clients to French authorities. Those details later made their way to the media. Stories in various outlets earlier this year prompted Franco Morra, the chief executive of HSBC’s Swiss bank, to say: “The old business model of Swiss private banking is no longer acceptable.”

Mr. Birkenfeld, who worked for UBS in Geneva, helped the U.S. build a case that resulted in a 2009 deferred prosecution agreement with the bank, which acknowledged helping U.S. clients evade taxes and agreed to pay $780 million. UBS rival Credit Suisse settled its own case about five years later, and roughly one dozen banks here remain under related Justice Department investigations. Mr. Birkenfeld recently traveled to Paris to assist judges there currently investigating UBS’s alleged aiding of tax evasion in that country.

The OffshoreAlert Conference describes the subject matter for the whistleblowers’ panel like so: “The session will take you inside the UBS and HSBC leaks and discuss issues material to whistleblowing, including the treatment of whistleblowers by law enforcement and tax collection agencies, how the system can be improved, the extent of global tax evasion, and the involvement of the world's major banks.”