Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

A Beat Balzli and Frank Hornig from the Spiegel wrote, after fighting Switzerland's banking secrecy laws for decades, European finance ministers are about to receive support from the United States. Investigations into major Swiss bank UBS and a proposed law against tax havens are ratcheting up pressure against the system.

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Richard Murphy recently observed that the Swiss Private Banker’s Association has looked at the consequences of making tax evasion a criminal offence in Switzerland (where it does not have that status at present) and has found that after asking someone they call a highly regarded expert on the subject - Professor Xavier Oberson, of Geneva University that the change would lead to an overall revision of Switzerland’s tax system.

Richard concluded that there will be those who will argue long and hard in Switzerland for retaining its corrupt ways, but it’s more likely many are now seeing the reality of their future, and are rapidly reconciling themselves to a world in which surviving of the wages of fraud looks like a cosy little number whose days were always going to be numbered.

Read Richard Murphy's post

The OECD is being urged to update the evasion blacklist as only three countries currently remain on the OECD list of tax havens: Liechtenstein, Monaco and Andorra.

As the Financial Times reported, quoting a French Official: "There are some countries which said they would co-operate and which were then removed from the list, but in practice they have not at all".

For instance, in the context of the Liechtenstein scandal, that should inciter to be careful, when

1) officials are bold enough to state that "It is not our duty to control if the tax payer was honest" or "Banking secrecy remains : Luxembourg is not compelled to communicate its clients'data"

2) some bankers agree to facilitate tax evasion from Liechtenstein to Luxembourg.

such center is unfortunately not reliable and trustable anymore: neither for the investor whoever he or she is, nor for organisations like the OECD.

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