German State Shares Details Of Swiss Bank Accounts - Report

Tom Burroughes

9 August 2016

The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia has shared details of Swiss bank accounts it managed to obtain from an anonymous source, according to news service Swissinfo .

The information was sent to state authorities anonymously on a hard drive through the post and contains three bundles of data, the report said. One bundle concerns foundations and shell companies with Swiss banks, and affects seven countries. Another bundle deals with around 160,000 accounts in Luxembourg banks. And the third bundle concerns internal documents of a “large European bank” that could potentially point European authorities to financial fraud, it said.

“We will use every opportunity to collaborate with the authorities of our European neighbours,” the state’s finance minister, Norbert Walter-Borjans, was quoted AS saying late last week.

North Rhine-Westphalia has previously exchanged such banking information. In April this year, it gave 27 European countries stolen bank records of Swiss accounts containing more than SFr100 million ($102 million) in funds.

The stolen data shared in April was purchased by the state authorities several years ago. The report said that among the banks fined were UBS (€300 million / $332 million), Credit Suisse (€150 million) and Julius Baer (€50 million).

The use of such stolen data, sometimes purchased from the “thief” or “whistleblower” with public funds, is controversial and raises questions about whether evidence thus obtained would be admissible in certain jurisdictions. In recent years, data has been taken from banks such as Credit Suisse, HSBC, Julius Baer and LGT.

In the case of Hervé Falciani, a former employee of HSBC Private Bank who took data and sought to sell it, his claim to be a whistleblower was rejected by a Swiss court and he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment late in 2015. However, as Falciani is not in Switzerland, it is unlikely he will serve a sentence.