Deutsche Welle, 16 april 2013
Police have launched a series of raids around the country after the state of Rhineland-Palatinate bought illicit data on Germans with Swiss bank accounts. The purchase is contentious, but is considered good business.
Police have launched a series of raids around the country after the state of Rhineland-Palatinate bought illicit data on Germans with Swiss bank accounts. The purchase is contentious, but is considered good business.
The state
finance minister for Rhineland-Palatinate, Social Democrat Carsten Kühl, said
that his regional government had paid around 4.4 million euros ($5.8 million)
for a CD containing up to 40,000 pertinent data files on Germans using
so-called tax havens. He described the data as authentic and of excellent
quality, also predicting that the German government as a whole would profit
greatly from the under-the-table purchase.
"We
expect a nationwide tax income of around 500 million euros from the information
now available," Kühl said on Tuesday, as first reports of as many as 200
home searches around the country began to filter in.
"A
modern country founded on the rule of law and social equality cannot do without
just tax returns," Kühl said. "That's why we have to take substantive
action to combat tax evasion." Kühl also said that tax evasion could not
be considered a kind of "cavalier offense," a common German term for
what's sometimes called a "white-collar crime" or peccadillo in
English.
According
to information in the online portal of German news giant Spiegel, the CD
contained data on more than 10,000 bank accounts specifically in Switzerland.
Though inexplicit, comments from the federal finance ministry appeared to
support this assertion.
Swiss
accounts apparently the focus
"The situation
regarding the acquisition from Switzerland of tax owed to Germany remains
unsatisfactory," a spokesman for the ministry said in Berlin. This
statement might be interpreted both as cautious endorsement of the CD's
purchase and as an oblique criticism of the opposition, however.
The federal
government had agreed a bilateral tax deal with Switzerland, approved in the
Swiss parliament, that failed to pass through the opposition-controlled upper
house of German parliament, the Bundesrat, in November last year. The
opposition argued that the deal was not good enough - criticizing the agreed
rates, the 10-year timeframe and the promise of continued anonymity for
investors.
Rhineland-Palatinate's
state government is also controlled by a coalition of the opposition Social
Democrats and Greens.
Previous
purchases of these tax CDs by German regional governments, denounced by Swiss
banks and politicians as illegal, were criticized by the federal government
before the death of the bilateral tax agreement. Then, Chancellor Merkel's
coalition said the actions undermined attempts to reach an official pact with
Switzerland.
The use of
so-called tax-havens has come under particular scrutiny this month with the
release of the "Offshore Leaks" list of as many as 130,000 alleged,
potential tax dodgers from around the world.
msh/mz (AFP, dpa, Reuters)
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