Financial Transparency Coalition

The Tax Justice Network has blogged repeatedly on the thoroughly toxic and dangerous tax deals that Switzerland has signed with Germany and the UK and others and is seeking to expand as a model to other countries. We have demonstrated on several occasions that the deals - which are supposed to apply withholding taxes on secret assets, in exchange for continued anonymity - are all but worthless, from a technical point of view (that is, they are absolutely riddled with loopholes, and will raise only a fraction of the promised sums; we have sent our detailed analysis to tax...

Switzerland has just signed a ‘Rubik’ deal with Austria which protects banks secrecy in return for an anonymous tax being returned to Austria. This is similar to the ruinous Rubik deals made with Britain and Germany. This deal, which must be ratified by both countries’ parliaments, makes public a covert Swiss-Austrian alliance to block EU cooperation against tax dodgers and prevent automatic exchange of tax information between European governments.