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 The lower
house of the Swiss Parliament rejected a bill allowing Swiss banks to provide
information on their foreign clients on request of U.S. tax authorities.
The reason
for the appearance of the bill was frequent accusations of American authorities
that the Swiss banks, helped U.S. citizens to evade taxes.
United
States insisted for the document to be adopted in July 2013; however the
current session of the Swiss Parliament ends this week. Thus vanished the
opportunity to apply this law. 123 members of the National Council voted
against the adoption of the law, yet 63 deputies supported the bill.
The bill
would allow Swiss banks to evade strict privacy laws that exist in the country,
and to disclose information about the accounts of their customers. Also
included in the bill is a clause requiring the banks to pay approximately $ 10
billion to U.S. authorities in compensation for the damage caused by the loss of
taxes.
Swiss
politicians are not willing to amend their legislation on demand from
Washington, reports the BBC correspondent Imogen Foulkes in Bern.
The Swiss
Senate approved the bill last week rather reluctantly; after it was revealed
that the U.S. could bring charges against Swiss banks while taking measures to
isolate them from the dollar market, in the event of failure to support the new
law.
As analysts
point out, long standing traditions of bank deposit secrecy may lead to a
political crisis in Switzerland, on which the European Union also has strong
pressure, linked to tax matters.
In January,
the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Swiss bank Wegelin & Co to pay the U.S.
government a fine of $ 58 million after admission of guilt of not preventing
more than 100 U.S. citizens to hide over $ 1.2 billion from the Internal
Revenue Service of the United States.
In 2009,
the largest Swiss bank, UBS paid U.S. authorities $ 780 million and provided
information on over 4,000 accounts of its American clients in order to avoid
criminal prosecution.
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