ZURICH: Switzerland's finance minister supports exchanging bank client data with foreign tax authorities under certain conditions, which the Swiss government will begin debating in June, according to a newspaper interview.
Swiss bank secrecy has come under fire, particularly from the United States, France and Germany, since the financial crisis. Switzerland agreed in 2009 to share more information with foreign authorities hunting tax cheats on request, but until now has rejected an automatic exchange of data.
"If you ask me what automatic exchange of information is realistic for me, then there would be two main requirements from a Swiss point of view," Swiss finance minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said in an interview in Saturday's edition of Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger.
Her requirements are that all other "meaningful" global financial centres also exchange data on an equivalent basis, and that the exchange extends to names tied to vehicles such as trusts linked to offshore accounts, Widmer-Schlumpf said.
"We (the Swiss government) will begin discussing this in June with a perspective of several years out," she said.
While Widmer-Schlumpf had previously signalled willingness to discuss automatic exchange of information, her comments on Saturday represent a more forthright tone than in the past.
However, the Swiss coalition government remains divided on the issue, even after European holdouts Luxembourg and Austria agreed last month to share data on accounts held by foreigners, which in turn upped the pressure on Switzerland.
Less than a month ago, Switzerland was singled out by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a laggard in making progress toward meeting new global standards for tax data exchange.
Widmer-Schlumpf's comments, which represent a shift from previous attempts to salvage Swiss banking secrecy via a series of withholding tax deals as well as a clean money strategy to ensure Swiss banks stop accepting undeclared funds, come less than a week after Swiss bankers dropped their outright rejection of the exchange of bank client data with foreign tax authorities.
In the Saturday interview, Widmer-Schlumpf said she envisaged Switzerland negotiating an automatic exchange of bank client data with an undisclosed number of countries. Alongside that, she said Switzerland should pursue a clean money strategy with countries outside the automatic exchange.
Widmer-Schlumpf's comments allude to the political debate surrounding secrecy, which is still fiercely guarded by right-wing politicians in particular. An expert commission on Swiss secrecy led by former top government economist Aymo Brunetti is set to present the government its findings in June, she said.
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