A majority of Swiss people remain in favour of retaining the country’s long-cherished tradition of bank secrecy despite growing international pressure for greater transparency, a poll showed Sunday.
“The Swiss are not ready to give up their banking secrecy,” the Matin Dimanche newspaper said as it published a survey showing 62 percent opposed to any change.
In the 15-34 age group, those opposed rose to 68 percent, the newspaper said of the poll of 602 people.
In the fallout from the global financial crisis, critics have called for major reforms, including an end to bank secrecy which they say contributed to the problem and makes tax fraud easier.
Switzerland, whose banks strictly enforced client secrecy, has found itself in the firing line and been forced to open up in the past year due to massive international pressure for change.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put Switzerland on a ‘grey list’ of tax havens in 2009 for not being cooperative enough and to get off it, Bern later signed a series of accords on sharing tax information.
It has also been embroiled in a series of disputes with the United States, Germany, France and others over allegations that their nationals have put money into Swiss bank accounts to avoid tax.
The US authorities hit UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank, with a huge fine and demanded information on thousands of US client accounts last year in a case which rumbles on, stirring domestic resentment at what is seen as foreign meddling.
Some 55 percent of those polled by Matin Dimanche said they opposed the automatic exchange of information about foreign account holders for tax purposes.
Meanwhile, press reports Sunday said the Zurich canton bank (ZKB) had now joined UBS and Credit Suisse in having had information stolen from them, said to reveal names of German account holders hiding cash in Switzerland.
