Swiss minister seeks level playing field on tax

By Emma Thomasson

ZURICH (Reuters) - The Swiss finance minister said on Wednesday that she wanted all countries to be treated equally in a drive to stamp out tax evasion, addressing concerns that Swiss banks had been unfairly singled out in recent years.

"We consider it very important that rules must apply to all and are engaging ourselves for a level playing field in multilateral forums," Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf told Reuters in written responses to emailed questions.

Her comments came after several leading EU countries announced a joint push against tax evasion, a message they will take to a meeting of finance officials from the Group of 20 top economies this week in Washington, which Widmer-Schlumpf will attend.

Swiss banks have repeatedly been in the firing line for aiding tax evasion, but the country often complains it is unfairly targeted compared to offshore centers elsewhere like Singapore, Miami and the Cayman Islands.

"Recent revelations have confirmed that various financial centers in America and Asia do not comply with international standards," Widmer-Schlumpf said, referring to the leak this month of data on thousands of holders of secret bank accounts, mostly in other centers like the British Virgin Islands.

The Swiss Bankers Association has said that only 0.05 percent of the 120,000 companies and trusts uncovered by the leak were based in Switzerland.

"Switzerland will continue to work to ensure that global standards are not only adopted by all countries, but also implemented. This concerns, for example, the identification of beneficial owners in trusts," the minister said.

Trusts, which allow assets to be held by one party on behalf of another - often unidentified - party and are common in Britain and other centers, can be abused to evade taxes.

Austria's finance minister, who has defied growing pressure for her country to follow Luxembourg's decision last week to end bank secrecy, has attacked the G20 for not tackling what she branded centers of money laundering such as the Cayman Islands, Virgin Islands or Delaware.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Swiss government said it was considering a possible solution to a long-running dispute with U.S. authorities over Swiss banks accused of helping wealthy Americans evade billions of dollars of tax.

Meanwhile, the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate said on Tuesday it hoped to yield half a billion euros in lost tax revenues from a CD it purchased containing data on secret accounts including at Credit Suisse subsidiaries, triggering police raids across the country.

Widmer-Schlumpf said she was following closely developments on the tax issue in the EU and elsewhere, adding a Swiss working group will deliver proposals by summer concerning how much client information banks should share in future.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson; editing by Mike Collett-White)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/swiss-minister-seeks-level-playing-field-tax-150408106--finance.html

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