The US crackdown on citizens allegedly stashing money offshore via UBS bank accounts continues, as a close family member of a wealthy client of the Swiss bank was indicted yesterday on charges of conspiracy and aiding in the filing of false tax returns, the New York Times reported.

The family member, Samuel Phineas Upham, was charged with four counts of helping to hide more than $11 million in UBS accounts controlled by a relative. He was also accused of smuggling into the US $450,000 that had been held in bank accounts in Zurich and London, the report said.

The indictment, from the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, arose out of a continuing investigation into clients of UBS and other banks that sold offshore tax evasion services through their private banks.

UBS, along with some other Swiss banks, no longer provides offshore banking for US clients. Last year, the Zurich-listed bank was embroiled in a bruising legal fight with the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department over demands that it hand over client data. The bank agreed last August to hand over details on up to 4,4500 accounts as part of a civil case. In a separate, criminal case, UBS has paid a $780 million fine to settle charges of aiding tax evaders.

In the latest indictment, a relative of Upham, Sybil Nancy Upham, 72, of Manhattan, opened a UBS account in 1993 in the name of a sham entity in Liechtenstein, the Rivaro Foundation, the NYT report said. Upham told UBS in 2000 that she wanted to avoid disclosure of the account to the Internal Revenue Service, the indictment said, and in 2005, she opened a second UBS account, in the name of a sham entity in Hong Kong. An unidentified financial advisor with a small trust company in Zurich was named as the account owner in an effort to disguise Ms. Upham’s ownership, and UBS signed asset management agreements with both sham entities.

The Uphams transferred money from the UBS accounts after the bank disclosed in May 2008 that it was under federal investigation on suspicion of helping wealthy clients avoid taxes, according to the indictment.

Mr Upham was arrested Nov. 29 in San Francisco and released on $500,000 bail. Calls to his lawyer, Jay Robert Weill, in San Francisco, were not immediately returned. Ms Upham was indicted in April.