A former banker for the Swiss giant UBS who blew the whistle on the biggest tax evasion scheme in US history has begun serving a forty-month jail sentence. In 2007, Bradley Birkenfeld came forward to US authorities and began providing inside information on how UBS was helping thousands of Americans hide assets in secret Swiss accounts. On Friday, Birkenfeld spoke to reporters before reporting to prison.

Bradley Birkenfeld: “I’d like to say how proud I am to be courageous enough to come forward. I do what I did to expose the largest tax fraud in the world. And the Bush Department of Justice didn’t expose this. I did. But I’ll tell you what the Bush Department of Justice did do. What they did do was give the kingpin, Martin Liechti, immunity after he pled the Fifth in front of the United States Senate and let him go back to Switzerland uncharged. Additionally, they gave international clients amnesty so they wouldn’t be charged. They also gave the largest bank in the world, UBS, they rewarded them with a deferred prosecution, and they are still withholding 15,000 client names from our government. The American taxpayers should be outraged.”

Bradley Birkenfeld’s lawyer Stephen Kohn criticized the Justice Department for prosecuting his client after he blew the whistle.

Stephen Kohn: “To take the whistleblower who is responsible for the single largest recovery ever for the American taxpayer, who has already saved and recovered for the taxpayers at least two to three to four billion — it will be much more — and to put him in jail is a travesty of justice. It is a miscarriage of justice. It is grotesque. But worse, it is sending a chilling effect. And maybe it’s fitting that we are here in the snow and in the cold, because this is the type of chilling effect it will have on the willingness of other bankers to step forward and do the right thing.”