Washington's intensifying hunt for tax evaders and their accomplices is creating a state of paranoia in the Swiss banking industry, with many bankers afraid to even leave the country, observers say. "There are many hundreds, up to a thousand (Swiss bankers and others who have worked directly with US clients) who are afraid of travelling to the United States or even to leave Switzerland," Martin Naville, the head of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, told AFP.
Business lawyer Douglas Hornung agreed with that estimate, pointing out that for people who used to work in Swiss banks' US divisions, "certainly even the lower level people are probably afraid to leave Switzerland". Swiss banks are believed to have accepted tens of billions of undeclared dollars from US citizens, though they now refuse such money, and a number of them are under US investigation.
In a bid to end the bitter dispute, Switzerland recently concluded a deal with Washington that ended its decades-long legal tradition of banking secrecy, enabling the banks to hand over information on US citizen's accounts. Far more data on the people who helped create and service those accounts will also soon be available to the US authorities, allowing them to intensify their hunt for the accomplices of tax dodgers.
The United States has not made public which individual bankers it is probing, but according to Swiss media at least 24 bankers have already been indicted, while more could figure unbeknownst to themselves on Interpol wanted lists. In October, the extent of the US reach was amply demonstrated when a former high-ranking UBS executive was suddenly arrested in Italy on suspicion he helped US customers conceal their assets. Raoul Weil, the 54-year-old ex-chairman of UBS's global wealth management service, was indicted by a US federal grand jury in 2008 for his alleged role in overseeing the US cross-border business.
The indictment alleges that Weil and co-conspirators helped US customers hide around $20 billion (15 billion euros) in assets from tax authorities. Weil probably "thought that after all of these years the US would not continue to trace him and certainly not put him on the Interpol list," Hornung speculated, "but he was definitely wrong".