Another UBS client gets reduced tax fraud sentence

By Tom Brown

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Reuters) - A British-born Florida yacht broker and former client of Swiss bank UBS AG received a reduced, two-month prison sentence for tax fraud on Friday because he cooperated with a U.S. investigation into the bank.

It was the third case in two weeks in which a former client of UBS was treated with relative leniency because he had aided a federal investigation of the Swiss bank and its ties with wealthy Americans, who evaded taxes by hiding money in secret, offshore accounts.

Robert Moran, a slim, balding 58-year-old U.S. citizen born in Leicester, England, appeared shaken when U.S. District Judge James Cohn announced the jail term. The two-month prison term was to be followed by one year of probation.

Moran had faced a maximum three-year prison term. Prosecutors, citing his substantial cooperation with U.S. authorities, sought a sentence of no more than seven months.

"The defendant did produce timely, significant and complete assistance to the government," Cohn said in pronouncing sentence.

But the judge, sitting in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Fort Lauderdale, added: "I think the public has become weary about people with all the trappings of success deceiving other investors, or in this case, the government."

Moran, a resident of Lighthouse Point, Florida, and a citizen since 1994, pleaded guilty in April to failing to report his offshore account at UBS, where he had been concealing more than $3 million in assets from the U.S. tax authorities.

In Friday's sentencing, the judge said Moran had already paid financial penalties to the government totaling nearly $1.9 million, including a fine equivalent to half the highest total of his foreign accounts.