FT.com / UK - Credit Suisse curbs German travel amid tax crackdown.
Fascinating article in the FT which requires a little deconstruction. To start:
Credit Suisse has severely restricted travel to Germany by private bankers working for rich German clients with accounts in Switzerland, amid fears that such employees could be detained by the authorities across the border.
Now why would CS do that if they did not fear there was nothing to hide?
The move follows the disclosure that authorities in D?ºsseldorf, capital of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, have purchased stolen data with the names of 1,100 Credit Suisse clients in Germany with Swiss accounts. The D?ºsseldorf authorities said they would pursue Credit Suisse staff suspected of helping Germans hide assets and avoid paying tax.
But says CS:
"We have made it very clear to relationship managers they must never assist clients evading tax," said Andres Luther, a Credit Suisse official.
And as they say:
The biggest problem concerns huge sums held in so- called "legacy" accounts, some dating back decades. Here, Switzerland hopes to reach agreements with its neighbours on means to regularise such holdings.
Unpack that and what do they mean? Could it be that they're suggesting this is a problem of all that money they hid from the Nazis - or that any links left in Germany are with former Nazis? It is, after all, their frequent claim that they only created banking secrecy because of the Nazis - a claim comprehensively de-bunked here.
So we have the Swiss trying to say the problem is all German to start with.
Which shows just how little we should tolerate their abuse. Because that's completely untrue. The Swiss assist crime as defined by all but corrupt states. That's the beginning and end of it. And they have to stop it - if necessarily by putting their bankers in jail.
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One of the best and briefest debunks of the Nazi story (that Swiss bank secrecy was instituted to protect Jews from Nazis) was by the Tax Justice Network in the Financial Times:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/62f14b80-19a5-11de-9d34-0000779fd2ac.html
Swiss secrecy laws had nothing to do with the Nazis
Published: March 26 2009 02:00 | Last updated: March 26 2009 02:00
From Mr Bruno Gurtner.
Sir, Your correspondent writes, in his article about Swiss bank secrecy (“A vault unlocked”, March 24), that Swiss secrecy laws “date back to 1934, when they were enacted partly to protect German Jews and trade unionists from the Nazis”. This is a big myth. The argument about it being set up to protect Jewish money first appeared in the November 1966 Bulletin of the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (today Credit Suisse). The main reason bank secrecy was strengthened in 1934 was a scandal two years earlier, when the Basler Handelsbank was caught in flagrante facilitating tax evasion by members of French high society, among them two bishops, several generals, and the owners of Le Figaro and Le Matin newspapers. Before that, there was professional secrecy (such as exists between doctors and their patients), and violation was a civil offence, not a criminal one as it is today. Swiss bank secrecy has always been an effective way to attract foreign money.
Many Swiss people are delighted that our country is going to stop blocking the exchange of information with other jurisdictions and will now follow Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development standards. For Switzerland this is a huge step. Other important steps must follow, to tackle other loopholes in the offshore world, such as those provided by British trusts and by other damaging facilities offered in Britain’s Crown Dependencies.
Bruno Gurtner,
Chair of the Global Board,
Tax Justice Network,
Bern, Switzerlan
I dare say you know perfectly well what is meant by legacy accounts or assets. You only pretend not to know so you can make the link to the claim that the bank secrecy originated in noble anti-Nazi motives.
Now, this claim has been debunked, not on this site – as you seem to be suggesting – but by several people, amongst others by the Swiss historian Sebastien Guex in 1999 in this article: http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/genes_1155-3219_1999_num_34_1_1549, and by another Swiss historian, Peter Hug, in an article in the Swiss paper Le Temps in April 2000.