The Miami-based online newsletter, Offshore Alert, has reported in a 2 July publication that new allegations of tax fraud in the US have been made against a former Cayman Islands-based banker.
John Mathewson, 80, residing in San Antonio, Texas, is the target of a new investigation into tax fraud by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

This, after Mr Mathewson, a former president of Guardian Bank and Trust in the Cayman Islands, gained notoriety when he gave US prosecutors records of his bank in 1999 as part of a plea bargain in return for leniency on tax evasion and money laundering charges in the 1990s.

Mr Mathewson, who at the time had faced a possible five-year prison term, was, instead, sentenced to five years’ probation, 500 hours community service and a US$30,000 fine for his cooperation.

Offshore Alert has reported, however, that a new investigation began after another former offshore-based private banker, Swiss national Roland Hurni-Gosman, allegedly “informed on Mathewson to the IRS and made a claim under the tax agency’s Informant Reward Program for 10 percent of any funds that are recovered from Mathewson as a result of the tip”.

According to Offshore Alert, Mr Hurni-Gosman, 60, and residing in England, was a former resident of another offshore tax haven, the Bahamas, “where he appears to have been the CEO of Apex Bank and Trust Company Limited, whose license was revoked by the Central Bank of the Bahamas in 2001, and Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, where he appears to have been a senior officer of Banque Generale du Luxembourg (Suisse) SA”.

However, Mr Hurni-Gosman is known to have been a resident of the Cayman Islands in the 1980s, working with the then Swiss Bank Corporation, one of whose clients at the time was Mr Matthewson. He later moved to Guernsey, where he was employed by another Swiss bank, Credit Suisse.

He was also, according to reports, Mr Mathewson’s business partner in a Texas-based oil and gas venture and made the move to inform to the IRS after the two had a disagreement over the distribution of profits concerning the project.

Mr Hurni-Gosman had filed a civil suit against Mr Mathewson at the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, in which a financial corporation located in the British Virgin Islands, called Akuna Matata Investments Limited, which is beneficially owned by Mr Hurni-Gosman and his wife, was seeking damages awarded to the company after it claims it was swindled out of profits after investing US$250,000 to “help develop oil and gas leases and wells in Colorado County, Texas” with two Texas-based firms affiliated with Mr Mathewson.

Although unrelated to the IRS matter, the suit helped make public the new proceedings against Mr Mathewson. The litigation was stayed on 14 April 2008, however, following a successful motion by Mr Mathewson in which he identified two of the people giving depositions as those who were “the subject of an on-going federal grand jury investigation”.

Meanwhile, reports are that Mr Mathewson is now suing the IRS to prevent the agency from enforcing a judgement for US$11.3 million that it obtained against him at the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida since 1993 in a dispute concerning unpaid taxes for the 1972 and 1974 through 1985.

Mr Mathewson’s claim is that he had an “understanding” with the US Department of Justice that in return for his cooperation by providing Guardian Bank’s clients, the million-dollar judgement would not be enforced.

Now accusing the IRS of a “double cross and broken promise”, Mr Mathewson said in his suit: “(He) exposed the workings of the illicit offshore banking industry and single-handedly provided intelligence and cooperation resulting in numerous successful prosecutions and the recovery of over $3 billion in unpaid tax liabilities, interest, and penalties from criminals and other tax-evaders.”

The case against Mr Mathewson in 1999 had, indeed, brought to light the goings-on in offshore tax havens in the Caribbean, as he had relinquished names, which included nearly 2,000 US depositors and allowed the IRS to recover US$50 million in back taxes and penalties in that year, with the possibility of netting more than US$300 million in unpaid taxes and penalties.

Assistant US Attorney John Carney had said at the time of Mr Mathewson’s sentencing: “It was, in effect, the functional equivalent of having the records of an offshore bank available in the United States for the first time.”

Mr Carney also described Mr Mathewson as “the most singularly important government co-operator in tax haven prosecutions in the history of the Internal Revenue Service”.

(Reproduced from www.caribbeannetnews.com)