Stéphanie Gibaud worked at UBS France from 1999, arranging luxury-brand partnerships and events for wealthy clients. After U.S. banker Bradley Birkenfeld’s disclosures triggered a major investigation into UBS’s assistance to American taxpayers evading taxes, Gibaud said her manager instructed her in June 2008 to erase a hard drive and destroy paper archives containing client and adviser information spanning France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Monaco. She refused and began cooperating with French customs, prosecutors, financial investigators, labor authorities, and later Belgian investigators.
Gibaud said UBS executives told her that Swiss advisers were illegally soliciting French clients on French territory and that UBS France maintained a parallel accounting system, reportedly called a “milk notebook,” recording offshore tax-evasion transactions. UBS attempted to dismiss her in 2009 and filed an unsuccessful defamation complaint in 2010; she was laid off in 2012. A French labor court ruled for Gibaud on March 5, 2015, ordering UBS to pay €30,000 for harassment, a judgment the bank did not appeal. Her disclosures were cited in French Senate tax-evasion inquiries, while her public testimony and book made her a prominent European whistleblower and contributed to continuing scrutiny of UBS’s cross-border banking practices.
