German regional state of North-Rhine Westphalia handed out to Greece files containing more than 10,588 data – that is Swiss bank accounts – of suspected tax dodgers. The data is from one Swiss bank but the name had not been revealed. The data on tax evaders was reportedly bought by NRW back in 2010 from Swiss authorities. The hand out was made in order to help Greece to crack down tax evasion.
“This is an important step for the Greek government to create more honesty regarding tax in the country,” said state NRW Finance Minister Norbert Walter-Borjans in a statement.
According to Reuters, “the information concerns Swiss bank accounts held by private individuals and companies from Greece with assets estimated to be worth up to a total of four billion Swiss Francs ($3.92 billion).”
Greek media report that the list handed out by the Germans apparently contains “assets worth 3.9billion Swiss Francs in 2006 and assets worth 2.9billion Swiss Francs in 2008.”
Hardly had NRW state had published and spread the news on the great achievement, and Deputy Finance Minister Trifon Alexiadis spoke to reporters announcing that Greece will grab the data and “start evaluating the data as soon as upcoming Monday.”
Tax control mechanism will immediately jump into the issue and “will not leave the date for 3 years in a drawer like the Lagarde-List,” Alexiadis added with a poisonous snipe towards the previous governments of PASOK mainly but also New Democracy.
Alexiadis said also that in the statement, adding it would ask Switzerland for additional information if needed. “This is a great chance for our community,” he said.
Alexiadis refrained from revealing how the Germans acquired these data promising to come up with the information in the next days.
German weekly DER SPIEGEL had recently reported that “the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has spent five million euros to acquire the data” and that “this is the most expensive purchase so far aiming to investigate tax evasion and fraudulent tax deals in a trade volume of 70 billion euros -by not only hiding black money, but also by criminal faking business transactions, which led to unjustified tax refund of capital gains.”
The data with assets of private individuals and companies can apparently lead to tax revenues of at least EUR 600 million. The tax inspectors from Nordrhein-Westfalen have reportedly managed to cash more than 2 billion euro in recent years through tax payments, cash requirements and penalties that have been imposed on banks, while nationwide the additional revenues are estimated to between four and five billion euros. Since 2010, about 120,000 Germans have declared themselves as “tax evaders.”
Nevertheless, it is not clear how the state of NRW obtained these data but I remember, a couple of years ago there was a huge legal issue in Germany about “obtaining stolen data saved on CDs.” Between 2010-2012 the state North-Rhine Westphalia apparently bought several CDs with data from Swiss banks. Here is a relevant article about “Tax evaders-CDs” however in German language.
Furthermore, I am not sure how far and back the Greek investigation can go as the bank accounts data are allegedly from 2006 and 2008.
