Financial Transparency Coalition

Could we be seeing a return to the bad old days of Swiss Banking? A right wing party in Switzerland, the Swiss People’s Party, has launched an assault on the automatic exchange of banking information, according to Swiss Daily Newspaper Tages Anzeiger. Starting next year, Swiss Banks will need to inform tax authorities in 38 countries

In less than a year data will start to flow under a new scheme for countries to share information automatically across borders, to help each other collect taxes from their taxpayers and fight financial crimes and abuses.  The scheme is the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) which was set up by the OECD, a club dominated

From Argentina’s La Nacion newspaper: “Switzerland has denied the Argentine judicial authorities information about 4,000 or so Argentine-owned bank accounts in Switzerland, saying that Argentina’s request had no solid foundation.” This concerns data revealed by an HSBC whistleblower, Hervé Falciani, which has caused a political storm in many countries and forced Falciani to go into hiding. 

A major leak of incriminating HSBC records last week resulted in print and television news coverage around the globe, trended on Twitter for several days and prompted several governments to start long-anticipated investigations. Through its Swiss entity, the British banking juggernaut helped customers from around the world to hide their money for tax evasion or other nefarious purposes without any questions asked. In fact, in several of the ‘scripts’ which accompany the accounts, banking personnel are seen to be very willing to accommodate dubious requests—from allowing cash withdrawals worth millions of dollars to setting up sham legal entities to obscure...