Indonesian jewelry company UBS Gold and three of its employees have been charged with illegally evading U.S. duties and tariffs by misrepresenting where jewelry was produced, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey.

The three UBS employees—company co-owner Michael Yahya, account executive Icha Anastasia, and Claudio Fogale, who serviced U.S. customers—each face one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Yahya and Anastasia are Indonesian nationals; Fogale is an Italian citizen.

Anastasia and Fogale were both detained on Nov. 12, while Yahya remains in Indonesia and has not yet been arrested, the statement said.

A complaint filed Nov. 15 in New Jersey federal court charged that after Indonesia lost its duty-free status in 2021, the defendants had conspired to evade U.S. import taxes by shipping pieces manufactured in Indonesia to Jordan—which at the time had a free trade agreement with the United States—and then claiming that the jewelry had been manufactured in Jordan.

Earlier this year, the U.S. placed tariffs on just about every trading partner. The complaint alleges that UBS responded by “shipping scrap gold from the United States to Jordan, which they falsely claimed was gold jewelry that simply needed to be assembled or finished in Jordan.

“Instead, the defendants swapped the scrap gold for UBS Gold jewelry made in Indonesia, which they then shipped from Jordan to the United States,” the complaint said. “The defendants falsely claimed that the jewelry had been manufactured in the United States, so they could avoid paying the tariffs that would otherwise apply.”

According to the DOJ, this scheme enabled UBS Gold and its customers to avoid paying approximately $86.5 million in duties and tariffs from 2021 to 2025.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) release issued Monday, which seems to refer to the UBS Gold case, said that Customs agents seized $13.36 million in gold following a search of a commercial facility in Brooklyn and an outbound shipment.

These prosecutions will likely become more common, says Joshua Kurland, a former Justice Department official who is now a partner specializing in trade issues at law firm Hogan Lovells.

“This area of trade enforcement was already on the increase,” Kurland tells JCK. “But now that tariffs have become the central economic policy of this administration, that adds rocket fuel to that enforcement. This is a good example of what criminal trade enforcement may look like.”

He notes that the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security announced in August that they were working together on a Trade Fraud Task Force and that CBP is working with Exiger, an AI-based supply chain company, to better detect illegal transshipments.

Anastasia’s attorney did not return a request for comment by press time. The other defendants did not have listed attorneys.

(Photo: Getty Images)