Darling says Swiss must take action on tax

[Joanne98]

Source: Reuters


BERLIN (Reuters) - Switzerland must make its tax system more open, Chancellor Alistair Darling said on Sunday, as world leaders seek to crack down on tax avoidance in the wake of the credit crunch.

Darling, speaking to the Observer, said it was "intolerable" that some people could shelter their wealth from tax, while others had no choice but to pay.

"It's one of the things Switzerland has got to address. If it wants to be part of the international community, it's got to be open," Darling said.

"It's important there is transparency. People don't know what's going on. That's not good. Indeed, half the many problems we have got now is because people didn't know what was going on."

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is hoping the G20 summit of developed and developing nations in London on April 2 will give leaders the chance to agree on tougher regulatory and taxation rules as part of reforms to shore up the financial system.

A host of countries have already expressed their concern over losing tax revenue because of havens such as Switzerland.



Read more: http://uk.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUKTRE51L14C20090222

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Not to mention the Switzerland is hiding every criminal in the world's money. All the mafias, all the drug cartels, all the dick-tators, all the political criminals, all the war criminals and all the mass murderers!

Expect another HUGE TEMPER TANTRUM FROM CNBC about this one!

[acmavm]

1. Yeppers. Go check on how 'neutral' the Swiss really were during WWII.

They helped hide assests stolen from Jewish people who tried to protect theirs family assets from the Nazis. OH YEAH, guess who's one of the main malefactors:

<snip>

Starting in 1995 the World Jewish Congress (WJC), a group with strong political connections to United States federal and state officials, began negotiations on behalf of various Jewish organizations with Swiss banks and the Swiss government over dormant Jewish World War II bank accounts. Led by Edgar Bronfman, the heir to the Seagram's fortune, the WJC entered a class-action in Brooklyn, NY combining several established suits in New York, California, and the District of Columbia. The original suits arose from grievances of Holocaust survivors and their heirs against Swiss banks. They were unable to access these numbered (anonymous) private accounts because of alleged stonewalling or requirements such as death certificates (obviously non-existent for victims of the concentration camps).


Hearings
The WJC was able to marshall the unprecedented support of U.S. government officials including senator Alfonse D'Amato R-NY, who held hearings of the Senate Banking Committee in which he claimed to possess "recently declassified documents that shed new light" on the Swiss role in the war. He also claimed that "hundreds of millions of dollars" of war-era Jewish assets remained in Swiss banks.<1> At the behest of President Bill Clinton,<2> Undersecretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat testified at these hearings and commissioned a report<3> which accused Switzerland of being "Nazi Germany's banker." The report relied exclusively on U.S. government archives. It contained no new historical information on Nazi victims' deposits into Swiss banks, and criticized the decisions of U.S. officials who negotiated settlements with Switzerland after the war as being too lenient. Christoph Meili, a Swiss bank guard, also testified at the hearings,<4> claiming to have witnessed illegal shredding of wartime records at Union Bank of Switzerland (SBG/UBS) in January 1997. He removed wartime records of transactions with German companies and gave them to the Swiss-Israeli Cultural Association. A warrant was issued for his arrest for violation of banking secrecy laws, and he fled to the U.S. UBS claimed the records were not relevant to dormant Jewish assets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Jewish_Congress_lawsuit_against_Swiss_Banks

[AndyTiedye]

3. If You are Looking for Hitler's Bankers, You Can Find Them Much Closer to Home

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.
…
The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.
…
While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

[acmavm]

5. I know about all that. This is different. I'm not talking right now about who

financed Hitler. Right now, it's just the damn dishonesty that has always been the way the Swiss Banking system works.

[NBachers]

2. I can't rec this thread- it says I already did, but I didn't

[daleo]

4. Be a darling

And pay your taxes.