Germany aims to buy Swiss banking data
By Erik Kirschbaum |
February 8, 2010, Monday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
GERMAN officials hunting tax evaders are negotiating to buy Swiss bank account data from a whistleblower in France, a magazine reported on Saturday, after Berlin declared that banking secrecy was finished.
Munich-based Focus magazine said tax authorities would likely acquire last weekend data on 1,500 German clients of a Swiss bank, in a campaign which Switzerland's president said on Saturday risked encouraging a market for stolen goods.
Quoting sources close to the investigation, Focus said the unnamed whistleblower had demanded a secret meeting in a neighboring country as he feared he would be arrested in Germany and the data confiscated as illegally obtained material.
The four officials were from the tax office in Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia state which is leading the current evasion probe. A finance ministry spokeswoman declined to comment on the newsweekly report.
Despite protests from Switzerland, Germany has said it was prepared to pay 2.5 million euros (US$3.4 million) for the stolen data said to contain detail about tax evaders that could, according to media reports, yield at least 400 million euros in tax revenue.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Switzerland's bank secrecy law was out of date in the 21st century and had to be abolished.
"Bank secrecy cannot be an instrument in the 21st century used to evade taxes," he told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in an interview published on Saturday. "There's no future for bank secrecy. It's finished. Its time has run out."
But Swiss President Doris Leuthard said Germany had to decide how it handled stolen goods. "We find the development simply difficult, worrying," she told Swiss national television on Saturday. "If one buys, it makes it more attractive, it makes it a business and that creates more of a market."
Germany's willingness to pay for the stolen bank data has shaken the large Swiss private banking industry and stirred emotions in both countries.
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