Financial Transparency Coalition

There's been some very disappointing news over the past 24 hours leaking out of the UBS settlement negotiations indicating that the Swiss banking giant will not be forced to pay a fine in the case and will only be required to reveal roughly 5,000 names - a fraction of the 52,000o offshore UBS accounts controlled by Americans in Switzerland. If this indeed is what the final settlement includes, then it will be a sad day for justice. Indeed the Swiss are even admitting that this settlement plan would do nothing to impart Swiss banking secrecy. From the...

The proposed resolution to a U.S. government demand for information about thousands of Americans suspected of using Swiss accounts to evade taxes would leave Swiss bank secrecy intact, a top Swiss official has said.

There is much speculation about the nature of the deal the US has come to with Switzerland over the UBS case and the US demand for 52,000 names concerning accounts they think might have resulted in US tax abuse. No one knows what the agreement is, but there’s lots of noise. In that there’s considerable spin going on. I can say one thing for sure: the US won’t get what it asked for and Switzerland will claim it’s banking secrecy will survive. The latter claim seems unlikely to be true. First, it’s thought that maybe 5,000 names will be given....

Swissinfo.ch has an article today detailing a movement among conservative youth in Switzerland which are petitioning in support of banking secrecy laws. From the article:

The youth branch of the rightwing Swiss People's Party has joined a campaign to protect banking secrecy by collecting signatures for a people's initiative.

Eric Hess, president of the group, told media in Bern on Tuesday that the effort was aimed at enshrining banking secrecy laws into the country's constitution to prevent the exchange of account holder data with foreign investigators.

This past year, young people...