BERLIN (Reuters) – German officials hunting tax evaders are negotiating to buy Swiss bank account data from a whistleblower in France, a magazine reported yesterday, after Berlin declared that banking secrecy was finished.
Munich-based Focus magazine said tax authorities would acquire this weekend data on 1,500 German clients of a Swiss bank, in an campaign which Switzerland’s president said yesterday risked encouraging a market for stolen goods.
Quoting sources close to the investigation, Focus said the unnamed whistleblower had demanded a secret meeting in a neighbouring country as he feared he would be arrested in Germany and the data confiscated as illegally-obtained material.
The four officials were from the tax office in Wuppertal in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia state which is leading the current evasion investigation. A spokeswoman for the finance ministry declined comment on the report in the newsweekly.
Despite protests from Switzerland, Germany has said it was prepared to pay 2.5 million euros for the stolen data said to be rich in detail about tax evaders that could, according to media reports, yield at least 400 million euros in tax revenues.