Rachel Ray’s Magnificent Ass
Swiss Secrets For Sale
Monday, February 1, 2010 
Someone has figured out that it is very lucrative for cash-strapped countries to go after tax cheats. Someone in Switzerland has figured out that there are buyers out there for the confidential lists of tax cheats—all one has to do it sort out the details and, voila! You’ve got thousands of panicked rich people scrambling for some sort of tax amnesty.
Switzerland faced a renewed assault on its private banking system as Germany considered paying for secret Swiss account data detailing alleged tax evasion by about 1,500 German taxpayers.
German authorities familiar with the investigation said Sunday that a confidential informant offered to sell them the data for €2.5 million ($3.5 million). The authorities, who say the information was stolen from a Swiss bank, say officials examined samples of the data that proved to be authentic.
Swiss banking, built on the promise of confidentiality, is still reeling from a bruising battle last year with the U.S. over allegations regarding tax evasion by U.S. taxpayers. Many Swiss bankers worry that such cases will erode client trust and lead to a flight of accounts to other countries. Under pressure from the U.S. and other nations, Switzerland recently agreed to water down its banking secrecy laws. Yet tax evasion isn’t a crime in Switzerland, and countries across Europe continue to complain that the Alpine nation is an attractive refuge for tax cheats.
A confrontation with Germany could represent the biggest challenge Switzerland has faced thus far. Though the Swiss clash with the U.S. drew much attention, Americans with offshore accounts in Switzerland represented no more than 5% of Switzerland’s $1.8 trillion offshore-banking business, according to KPMG.
Is this a good thing? I don’t know. I do know this—I’ll never put my money in a Swiss bank.
Up next, all those rich Austrians and their Swiss bank accounts. They’re probably just waiting for that shoe to drop. Everyone now sees the pending collapse of doing business with the Swiss. And all for a few million? It doesn’t take much to unravel an entire industry, does it?
