Sarkozy's new blacklist of "tax havens" provokes anger
10 November 2011
French president Nicolas Sarkozy nearly caused
a diplomatic crisis last week when he called on eleven
jurisdictions - including Switzerland - to be ostracised as "tax
havens".
In a speech at the conclusion of the Cannes
G20 summit, Sarkozy said the offending countries should be shunned
by the international community, because they declined to exchange
all tax information automatically with other countries. Automatic
information exchange is a stated objective of the European
Commission, though not the OECD Global Forum.
"Our message is clear - we do not want tax
havens any longer", Sarkozy told the meeting. He said future G20
summits would issue a list of countries that fall short of
"acceptable tax practices".
The eleven countries currently marked for
"ostracism" (au ban) are Antigua, Barbados, Botswana,
Brunei, Panama, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Vanuata,
Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
Switzerland's State Secretariat for
International Financial Matters reacted by issuing a statement that
it already met OECD standards on tax information exchange.
Uruguay was more sensitive. Its foreign
minister described Sarkozy's remarks as "unacceptable exaggerations
and excesses", and recalled the country's ambassador in Paris. He
also summoned France's charge d'affaires in Montevideo to explain
his master's "misinformed" comments. The Uruguyan opposition party
tried to make it a nationalist issue, accusing Uruguay's larger
rivals Brazil and Argentina - both of them in the G20 - of putting
Sarkozy up to his speech.
• Although even the OECD acknowledges that
Switzerland has made much progress in providing information to
foreign tax authorities, the country is still under huge pressure
to relax its banking secrecy even further. This week Credit Suisse
began writing to American owners of private bank accounts, warning
them that it is about to disclose their identities to the US
authorities. There are also persistent rumours that the Swiss
government is negotiating a tax information exchange agreement with
the USA.
Sources
Swissinfo
Swissinfo (2)
CBanque (in French)
Courrier International (in French)
Les Echos (in French)
EU Observer
Reuters (Credit Suisse development)
Reuters 2
Bloomberg
Romandie News (in French)
Figaro (in French)