Financial Transparency Coalition

From Bruno Gurtner, guest editor. Tax Justice Focus, Volume 6, Number 2 – The SWITZERLAND edition. October 5th, 2010 The Switzerland edition - click here The latest edition of Tax Justice Focus explores the changing face of tax haven Switzerland. Historically one of the world’s most important secrecy jurisdictions, Switzerland – along with its financial services sector – has recently been buffetted by a series of scandals and pressures. These range from a giant tax evasion probe in the United States targetting the Swiss bank UBS, to massive damage to the banks from the ...

The Swiss government has announced that it has examined the dossiers of over four thousand UBS clients suspected of committing tax evasion offences in the United States, but they have only transmitted their findings to the US authorities for around half of the examined cases. Under the terms of the administrative agreement agreed between Switzerland and the US in August 2009, criteria were established for proceeding with an administrative assistance request submitted by the Inland Revenue Service. This included a requirement that the Swiss Federal Tax Authority examines 4,450 UBS...

ZURICH (Dow Jones) -- A Swiss court Monday said it backed a U.S.-Swiss deal governing the handover of thousands of pages of confidential data on clients of UBS AG (UBS) to U.S. tax officials as "binding," rejecting an appeal by a client of the Swiss bank in a test case.

From Switzerland's Le Temps newspaper this morning (translated from the French)

The Ticino lawyer Fabrizio Pessina, from Chiasso, was arrested at Malpensa airport (Milan) on March 2 on his return from Spain where he had been playing golf. The financial brigade was interested in him, in the context of an investigation into two Italian businessmen suspected of diverting funds from a real estate project in Milan. On Fabrizio Pessina's personal computers the investigators found, it seems by chance, a list of 552 Italian taxpayers with the details of their bank accounts, including the names of their...