Reuters has reported:

Switzerland has won the backing of G20 chairman Britain for its efforts to stay off an international blacklist of uncooperative tax havens, the finance ministry said on Saturday.

Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf Merz met Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London on Saturday, the day after Switzerland offered to relax its strict banking secrecy in some tax evasion cases, the ministry said in a statement.

There will be massive misinformation put out by all sides in the run up to the G20. I’m assuming that this is what the Swiss are doing here.

It would be incredible if this story were true: you should not be able to get off a black list on the basis of a press release. Action has to be the requirement and Switzerland has a very, very, long way to go before it even approaches acceptable norms of behaviour — which themselves are not good enough.