ITALIANS ARE calling it the "trickle-down effect" as names of holders of Liechtenstein bank accounts are leaked to the press, including politicians, entertainers, industrialists and even a dog called Gunther.
Denials and clarifications are hitting the headlines as the leaks keep pouring out, with the Italian media not in the least shy about releasing names before checking with the alleged holders at Liechtenstein's Bank LGT.
Tax investigators note that holding an account itself is not illegal, but are still poring over some 400 Italian names obtained from the UK government, with a list from Germany also in the works, to see if they are tax compliant. About 24 names have emerged so far. No charges are known to have been pressed yet.
Judicial sources told the Financial Timesthat as the data are several years old it is not known how much money remains. Some accounts had tens of millions of euros, several were in the hundreds of millions. Funds are also believed to have returned to Italy under tax amnesties offered by the previous government led by Silvio Berlusconi.
Senator Luigi Grillo of the centre-right opposition was one of the first to deny any wrongdoing in having a Liechtenstein account. He said it was linked to the sale of a property he owned to a Liechtenstein businessman. Vito Bonsignore, a Euro-MP and opposition candidate in next month's Italian elections, also said his account was lawful.
Maria Ilva Biolcati, a flame-haired singer known as Milva, denied she had an account, saying she had never set foot in Liechtenstein.
La Stampa, a Turin newspaper, quoted industrialist Maurizio Mian as confirming he had had money in Liechtenstein that had belonged to Gunther, his German shepherd, and that the funds had legitimately returned to Italy.
Copies of the list have multiplied as they are distributed among tax investigators in Italy's different regions. Politicians, mostly from the left, have demanded the names of account-holders be made public before the parliamentary elections. The leaks could also encourage people to come forward and regularise their tax affairs.
Meanwhile, tax authorities in Baden-Württemberg in south-west Germany have been offered data on 30,000 bank accounts held by Germans in Switzerland, the German state's finance ministry said, confirming a report in the daily Stuttgarter Nachrichten.
The data offered by the unnamed informer are believed to contain evidence of tax evasion by investors from across Germany, though it is unclear at this stage how significant the information is, a ministry spokeswoman said. Federal authorities recently launched an investigation into claims that scores of high-earning Germans have evaded taxes by hiding money in accounts in Liechtenstein.
Switzerland's finance minister said yesterday bank secrecy laws were not up for discussion, brushing off criticism from German officials seeking to curb tax evasion. Swiss "bank secrecy is a nut you're not going to crack," Hans-Rudolf Merz said in a speech to parliament in Bern today. "It is not up for discussion."
- (Financial Times service)
