C’mon! This is getting ridiculous. You cannot hoard the headlines every day, UBS. Give some other hotshot global institution a chance to take a spectacular fall on a banking banana peel for a change. For those of you who have been taking a bath in Siberia for the past 12 hours, the world’s biggest bank for the wealthy (or at least, we think it still holds this title) is being investigated by U.S. authorities for possibly helping its ultra-rich clients evade taxes. (We’d like to take a moment here to reflect on the ugliness of the word “evade.” Might we suggest, you know, maybe “defer”?) And there’s more. A senior bank employee is now being raked over the coals by the U.S. Justice Department. He’s already been dragged across the pond and is being detained at this very moment. And names are being named.

UBS AG, sustaining record losses from the subprime crisis, said the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether the world's biggest money manager for the wealthy helped clients evade American taxes.

One senior bank employee was "briefly detained" by U.S. authorities as a "material witness," the firm said in an e- mailed statement. The Financial Times reported that the employee was Martin Liechti, the Zurich-based head of UBS's international wealth management business for the Americas. Rohini Pragasam, a UBS spokeswoman in New York, declined to comment on the FT report. Liechti could not immediately be reached for comment.

Battered by $38 billion of writedowns, UBS said yesterday that clients pulled a net 12.8 billion francs from its asset- and wealth-management units, the first withdrawal in almost eight years. UBS's U.S. wealth management Web site promises to help clients meet objectives including "tax minimization." German prosecutors said in March they're weighing a criminal investigation into whether UBS helped clients evade taxes.

"UBS has been hit by a perfect storm," said Edwin Merner, who oversees $2 billion at Atlantis Investment Research Corp. in Tokyo. "Clients may run away if they think they'll leak information to tax authorities in Germany and the U.S."

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