Switzerland remains the least financially transparent country in the world despite recent changes to its secrecy laws.
The verdict comes from the Tax Justice Network’s annual report which ranked Switzerland at the top of its Financial Secrecy Index 2015, ahead of Hong Kong, Singapore and the Cayman Islands.
“Despite what you may have heard, Swiss banking secrecy is far from dead, though it has curbed its secrecy somewhat,” the TJN said, calling Switzerland “the grandfather of the world’s secretive tax havens”.
Its aggressive and “apparently illegal pursuit of secrecy-breaking whistleblowers highlights the strength of the Swiss secrecy lobby,” the report said.
The report noted that Switzerland has committed to the OECD’s global level Common Reporting Standard (CRS) of automatic information exchange of bank account information, which aims to crack down on tax evasion.
But it will only start to apply this in 2018, later than many other countries, “and it has said it will be selective about which countries it will share information with”.
The report was critical of the UK for supporting a network of secrecy jurisdictions around the world, such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Jersey and the British Virgin Islands, “whose trusts and shell companies hold many trillions of dollars’ worth of assets”.
If the UK and its “offshore satellites” were treated as one unit it would have topped the secrecy index above Switzerland, the Network said.
The report concludes that worldwide, private financial wealth of between $21 trillion and $32 trillion is located in secretive locations around the world, where it is either untaxed or lightly taxed.
