RFI, France
– Switserland, 21 May 2014
French tax
authorities have collected a billion more euros than they expected in an
anti-tax-evasion drive, allowing Prime Minister Manuel Valls to finance all his
tax cuts for lower incomes and still have money left over.
More than
20,000 French nationals who had secret Swiss bank accounts took advantage of a
government offer to go easy on them if they owned up, according to Finance
Minister Michel Sapin.
That should
net the exchequer 1.8 billion euros, more than double the 800,000 euros
originally expected.
According
to Sapin, 764 million euros have already been collected.
If efforts
to track down secret accounts bear fruit even more could be forthcoming, since
80,000 French citizens are believed to be clients of Swiss banks on the quiet.
Unofficial
estimates by the finance ministry put 2015’s possible extra income at two
billion euros.
On Tuesday
Valls announced that the windfall would completely finance the tax cuts for low
incomes that he promised last week, although those are supposed to last while
some of the windfall is one-off.
They are
expected to cost one billion euros.
In 2013
then-budget minister Bernard Cazeneuve offered reduced penalties to tax evaders
who came forward.
Since then
pressure from the US and the OECD has forced Switzerland to change its law on
banking confidentiality, making it difficult to keep an account secret.
The French
state is believed to lose 60-80 billion euros per year through tax fraud and
avoidance, notably by multi-nationals, including France’s thriving luxury goods
sector, that dodge taxes through price transfers to tax havens.
Efforts to
persuade French and German customers to come clean to local tax authorities are
"making good progress", Urs Rohner, the boss of Crédit Suisse told
the Neue Zurcher Zeitung on Wednesday.
On Monday
the Swiss bank was fined a record 2.6 billion dollars (1.9 billion euros) in
the US after admitting helping rich Americans dodge taxes, following a smaller
fine by the Security and Exchange Commission for soliciting customers without
notifying local authorities.
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