Obama's Foursome

American Spectator ^ | 1.25.10 | The Prowler

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MEN OF HONOR Apparently, if you want to cheat on your wife or spurn the mother of your unborn child, cover up and easily settle your institution's criminal efforts to help Americans avoid paying their federal income taxes, or just avoid paying your own fair share, the place to be is on President Barack Obama's economic-recovery advisory board. Because that's where Robert Wolf, chief executive of UBS Group Americas, the U.S. arm of one of Switzerland's largest banks, UBS AG, sits, as do Charles E. Phillips, President of Oracle Corporation, Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management of and Budget, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. One imagines that's where they can get together to compare notes.

Roberts' parent bank, UBS AG, agreed last year to pay the U.S. government $780 million to settle accusations that it assisted more than 52,000 American clients to defraud the Internal Revenue Service by hiding their wealth overseas to avoid paying income taxes. The White House claims that it determined that Wolf's wing of the company was not involved, but according to a former Obama White House Counsel staffer, internal White House research determined that just about every client involved in this scam at one time or another was a client of UBS Group America.

Phillips became an instant celebrity last week, when his former mistress paid for billboards highlighting his philandering ways to go up in San Francisco, Atlanta and New York. Phillips, who reportedly has reconciled with his wife, kept his mistress housed in an $11 million estate near his corporate headquarters in the Bay Area, and bought the estate through the use of shell corporations in Nevada.