 (photo: AP / Matt Dunham) |
Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, described Swiss bank secrecy as “intolerable”, but his comments, and a pledge from Europe’s G20 finance ministers to crack down on tax havens, drew a sceptical response from Switzerland’s bankers.
Michel Desroberts, secretary-general of the Swiss Private Bankers’ Association, said that the criticism of Switzerland and the proposed G20 initiative were connected to the budgetary problems facing many governments amid the financial crisis.
Mr Desroberts said: “Governments have been asked to finance banks and they need to raise a lot of money. They don’t want to raise taxes but they have a belief they can raise billions from money deposited in banks in tax havens.”
He doubted whether the initiative would work. He said that Switzerland was not a tax haven because cooperation existed in matters of tax fraud and he suggested that European Union countries had their own issues regarding tax competition.
He said: “There are tax havens within the European Union, lots of dependent territories of Britain. [Governments] want to look at this issue and that is their right, but the importance of tax havens is overstated.”
Mr Desroberts admitted that there were legal limits to Switzerland’s ability to cooperate with foreign tax authorities and he said that the recent UBS case had not helped. The Swiss Government is refusing to attend a US Senate hearing in Washington on tax havens in a protest against a lawsuit issued by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) aimed at forcing UBS to hand over details concerning 52,000 clients who allegedly concealed $14 billion (£9.64 billion) in funds from the IRS. The case came as Switzerland’s largest bank had agreed to pay $780 million in fines and hand over information concerning 300 of the bank’s American clients.
According to UBS, the lawsuit would require bank officials to break Swiss law and would expose them to criminal sanction in Switzerland.
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