Switzerland's oldest bank took the American clients UBS dropped, pleaded guilty in New York, and closed after 272 years

Caspar Zyli, a linen merchant, founded the firm in St. Gallen in 1741. It took the name Wegelin & Co. in 1893. It was a partnership whose senior partners were personally liable, and their names were part of its legal name^†. In the 1990s partner Konrad Hummler led a management buyout, and the Wegelin family kept 20 percent^†. By mid-2008 UBS, under US investigation, had stopped serving undeclared accounts for Americans. US prosecutors say Wegelin then opened dozens of new undeclared accounts for Americans in 2008 and 2009 to capture those clients. It was the first foreign bank indicted in the United States for helping Americans evade tax. In early 2012 it moved its non-US business, clients and almost all staff into a new bank, Notenstein, which was sold to the Raiffeisen group. On 3 January 2013 managing partner Otto Bruderer pleaded guilty for the bank in Manhattan before Judge Jed Rakoff to conspiring to help US taxpayers hide more than $1.2 billion from the IRS between about 2002 and 2010. In March 2013 the bank was sentenced to pay about $58 million: $20 million in restitution, a $22.05 million fine and $15.8 million in forfeited fees. With $16.2 million seized from its US correspondent account in April 2012, the United States recovered about $74 million. Wegelin then ceased business. Status: convicted on its plea; sentence paid.