8:39 AM
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The United States is pushing for Switzerland to hand over
thousands more bank client names as it did last year when it allowed UBS to
bend bank secrecy and reveal the details of around 4,450 clients to avoid
criminal charges. “They wont be contented with less than in the UBS case,"
former US Justice Department investigator Peter Henning told the NZZ am Sonntag
newspaper. He added that the US Internal Revenue Service felt betrayed because
many UBS clients had shifted their assets to smaller Swiss banks rather than
declaring them.
The SonntagsZeitung quoted Swiss sources close to the
talks as saying Washington is seeking details of all US clients with accounts
worth at least $50,000 between 2002 and 2010 at banks including Credit Suisse,
private banks Julius Baer and Wegelin as well as the Zurich and Basel cantonal
banks.
That could imply tens of thousands of accounts, the paper
said, far more than Switzerland could deliver under adouble taxation agreement
with the United States that it approved in 2009 but is still awaiting
ratification by the US Senate.
Switzerland is keen to find a solution that would not
need approval from parliament, seen as likely to block any new breach of bank
secrecy after only reluctantly agreeing to the UBS treaty under emergency law
last year.
If Switzerland does not comply, the United States could
issue a subpoena against the banks to force them to hand over data, as it did
in the case of UBS, the SonntagsZeitung and NZZ am Sonntag reported.
“This will be much more expensive as with UBS that had to
pay a fine of $780 million,” one banking source told the SonntagsZeitung .“We
expect that the Swiss banks will have to pay afine of up to 2 billion Swiss
francs ($2.6 billion) and deliver much more client data than in the UBS
case." Henning said the United States would probably launch criminal
charges against a smaller Swiss bank rather than Credit Suisse as it was too
critical to the global financial system.
Last
month, Switzerland struck deals with Germany and Britain to tax money kept by
their residents in secret Swiss accounts and also introduce a withholding tax
on future interest earned, a proposal rejected by Washington.