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TAX EVASION

Swiss banker lied over French accounts: report

A former banker who threatened to blow the lid on a list of French politicians and "big names" with Swiss bank accounts fabricated the entire story, a Swiss business newspaper reported on Friday.

Swiss banker lied over French accounts: report
Pierre Condamin-Gerbier, former employee of Geneva bank Reyl and Cie. Photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP

Pierre Condamin-Gerbier, a key witness in a major French tax fraud investigation, is under arrest in Switzerland after breaching the country's banking secrecy laws by testifying in the investigation into France's former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac.

But Condamin-Gerbier's lawyer told Swiss financial daily Agefi the former Geneva banker had invented a list of French politicians with secret Swiss accounts.

"This list never existed," lawyer Edmond de Braun said, adding that his client had lied "to silence the threats that he was subject to at the time."

The former banker "now acknowledges that this was a very clumsy" strategy, he told Agefi.

Condamin-Gerbier was arrested in Switzerland last month shortly after he testified before a French parliamentary commission investigating Cahuzac, who resigned as budget minister in March.

He quit over an undeclared foreign bank account said to contain around 600,000 euros ($770,000).

Condamin-Gerbier, who remains in Swiss custody, told media he had given French investigators details of 15 French politicians and "big names" with undeclared bank accounts in Switzerland.

De Braun told Agefi his client became entangled in the affair after French daily Le Monde published a "defamatory" article about him.

"He wanted to correct what had been said about him through other media, and lost himself in this inextricable process," de Braun said.

"It was the worst thing he could have done," 

Condamin-Gerbier's former employer Geneva bank Reyl and Cie, which is at the heart of the Cahuzac scandal and which is under investigation in France for enabling tax fraud, filed a criminal complaint against its former employee in June for among other things "falsifying documents and violating professional and commercial confidentiality." 

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TAX EVASION

Switzerland’s banks remain among the world’s most secretive

Despite the progress made over the years, the Swiss financial sector continues to be one of the least transparent in the world. But there is good news too.

Switzerland’s banks remain among the world’s most secretive
Switzerland remains one of the world's least transparent nations. Photo AFP

Switzerland is in the third place in the 2020 Financial Secrecy Index released by the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Tax Justice Network (TJN), which rates 133 nations based on their financial transparency.

Two other European countries, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, are also ranked among the top 10 least transparent nations on the TJN’s list.

Despite being in the third place, Switzerland ranks better this year than it did in the previous edition of the Index, which is released every two years — it slipped from the first to third place. The Cayman Islands and the United States took the first and second spots, respectively.

Switzerland reduced its risk of being an offshore haven for tax cheats by 12 percent, “finally improving enough to move off the top of the index”, TJN said. 

READ MORE: Switzerland's strangest taxes – and what happens if you don't pay them

This improvement is mainly due to Switzerland extending its international network for the automatic exchange of customer information to more than 100 countries. 

Also, in a referendum held last year, Swiss voters accepted the Federal Act on Tax Reform and AVS Financing (TRAF). This legislation introduced major changes in the Swiss tax system by ending some preferential tax schemes and replacing them with new regulations which are in line with international standards.

This tax reform prompted the European Union to change Switzerland's status from ‘tax haven' to one which is EU-compliant, removing strict controls on transactions within the EU. 

So why, despite all the reforms, does Switzerland still rank among the world’s least transparent nations?

According to a Swiss NGO Alliance Sud, wealthy people from poor countries can still hide their money here from the tax authorities of their home nations.

Alliance Sud noted that despite the progress made in the past years by Swiss financial institutions, “the fight against tax evasion remains insufficient”.

Switzerland is the world’s biggest centre for managing offshore wealth, with a quarter of global assets invested here.

For years, it has been placed on various lists of tax havens where wealthy foreigners could park their money. Faced with widespread criticism for this practice, Switzerland passed an anti-money laundering law in 1997 and introduced strict regulations against tax evasion.
 

 

 
 

 

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