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Ex-Greek minister tampered with bank data

Former Greek finance minister George Papaconstantinou was handed a suspended one-year prison sentence on Tuesday after being found guilty of tampering with a Swiss bank list, a court source said.

Published: 24 March 2015 19:29 CET

Ex-Greek minister tampered with bank data

Photo: Liana Bitoli

A special court found 53-year-old guilty of removing the names of family members from the list of 2,000 Greeks with accounts in British bank HSBC in Switzerland.

The charge was reduced from a felony to a misdemeanour, and Papaconstantinou was also cleared of breach of duty in tampering with the data.

The list had been sent to Papaconstantinou in 2010 by Christine Lagarde, International Monetary Fund chief and at the time French finance minister.

Lagarde had got it from HSBC whistleblower Hervé Falciani, a former IT worker at HSBC Private Bank in Geneva.

The ex-minister risked a life term if the special tribunal had found him guilty on two counts of felony.

The verdict had been eagerly awaited as the government of left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, elected in January, had pledged to clamp down on corruption and make government more efficient.

Similar revelations in the so-called "Lagarde List" have in recent years revealed prominent figures in Europe hiding money in Switzerland, leading to pressure on the Alpine country to dismantle its decades-old tradition of banking secrecy.

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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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