Swiss lawmakers on Wednesday voted to relax strict secrecy laws to make it easier to liquidate unclaimed accounts held in Swiss banks, a major step forward in efforts to deal with wealth hidden by Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War. Though Switzerland's UBS and Credit Suisse reached a $1.25 billion deal with Holocaust survivors and their descendants in 1998, the Swiss government has spent years attempting to amend banking secrecy laws to try to deal with unclaimed accounts.
On Wednesday, the lower house of parliament made a breakthrough, agreeing to suspend secrecy rules in order to allow unclaimed funds to be moved to another bank and liquidated without an account holder's approval. The secrecy rules would only be waived if the bank could prove it had repeatedly failed to reach the account's owner or their beneficiaries.
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