The German government said it may buy stolen information relating to Swiss bank accounts, risking a worsening of relations between the two neighbors already damaged last year in a spat over tax evasion.
“We will decide this case along the same lines that we decided the Liechtenstein case,” German Finance Ministry spokesman Michael Offer told reporters in Berlin today. “In the case of Lichtenstein, the conclusion was reached to buy the data.” There are “a number of questions that still need to be answered” before a decision, Offer said.
German authorities opened a tax-evasion probe in 2008 aimed at hundreds of investors in Liechtenstein, a principality adjacent to Switzerland, using data purchased from a former employee of LGT Group. Crown Prince Alois, who rules Liechtenstein, called the probe an “attack” on his country.
The Swiss case involves files on Swiss bank accounts held by German nationals which may enable the government to recoup as much as 200 million euros ($277 million) in lost tax revenue, newspapers including Handelsblatt reported late yesterday.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and his Swiss counterpart, Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf Merz, held “constructive” talks by phone today, when they agreed to work to resolve the matter together, Offer said.
The potential sale of Swiss bank account details comes as Merkel’s coalition with the Free Democrats, in office since October, attempts to repair relations with Switzerland damaged last year when then Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said Swiss rules encouraged Germans to evade taxes at home. Blick, the Swiss mass-market newspaper, said that Steinbrueck, a Social Democrat, was one of the “most hated people in Switzerland.”
‘Deep’ Ties
“I think relations are so stable, friendly and deep that they won’t be affected by what’s happened,” German Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle told ZDF television yesterday.
The Swiss information was drawn primarily from accounts at UBS AG, Handelsblatt reported today. The Financial Times Deutschland said the data came from a Geneva-based private- banking unit of HSBC Holdings Plc. German authorities have been offered information on about 1,300 German holders of Swiss bank accounts for 2.5 million euros, the FTD said.
UBS “is not aware of any such information,” spokesman Christoph Meier said yesterday of the Handelsblatt report. “At this point in time this is speculation.”
Steffen Poerner, a spokesman for HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt AG, the Dusseldorf, Germany-based bank controlled by HSBC, said he couldn’t immediately comment on the report. A spokesman for HSBC in Geneva declined to comment when contacted by phone today.
To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Donahue in Berlin at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net
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