Financial Transparency Coalition

David McNair of Christian Aid has an article under the first part of the above title in the Guardian today. David is right to draw attention to the toxic nature of a new deal between Germany and Switzerland – but the UK is also set to sign such a deal very soon. I wrote about this in May, saying the following, and nothing has changed since:

The FT reported today that the UK is to shortly sign a new tax deal with Switzerland. As it said:

Britons with billions of pounds hidden in Switzerland will pay tax...

An imminent “final withholding tax treaty”, will allow Germany to claw back some revenue from tax evasion, but it will also protect Swiss bank secrecy and undermine the prospect of automatic information exchange. Swiss and German negotiators will probably conclude the deal on 10^th August. The deal will then have to be approved through the respective national legislative processes, so there will be opportunities for civil society to mobilize opposition and generate debate about information exchange. A withholding tax will be charged on income from savings and investments of German citizens with Swiss accounts, i.e those who had previously evaded...

LONDON – Christian Aid is urging the Chancellor to consider how poor countries could be harmed by a deal allowing UK citizens with secret Swiss bank accounts to continue hiding their identities from the British taxman.

TJN has repeatedly reported about Switzerland’s devious strategy of breaking the European Union’s thrust for a functioning system of automatic information exchange. The Swiss Finance Ministry, in conjunction with its banks, deployed a strategy to fence off the dawning end of financial secrecy, called the “final withholding tax”. It is designed to preserve banking secrecy while buying off noise-making foreign governments through the transfer of a final tax on foreign citizens’ financial account’s income (details here). The German-language Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger reported on spokespersons of the German and Swiss Finance Ministries signalling their willingness to soon...