German authorities to tell Revenue of evaders

GERMAN PROSECUTORS have said they will provide the Revenue Commissioners in Dublin and other tax authorities worldwide with any names of alleged tax evaders in their respective jurisdictions - at no charge.

Tax investigators said yesterday that, since going public two weeks ago, they have raided 120 homes of Germans with more than €200 million secreted away in a Liechtenstein bank.

Some 91 people have already confessed to the charge of tax evasion and have agreed to pay €28 million in back taxes and fines. Another 72 people, anticipating raids, have already turned themselves in, officials said.

The raids are based on a client list stolen from the LGT Bank in Vaduz by a German technician hired to digitise their records. He sold it for more than €4 million to the German tax authorities via the secret service.

"Because this capital plus interest was hidden, enormous volumes of tax have been evaded. Most people don't even try to deny it," said a spokesman for the state prosecutor in the western city of Bochum, which is in charge of the investigation.

"Those who have turned themselves in will be checked to see if they did so early enough to be freed of charges."

It also emerged yesterday that the German authorities are investigating whether Swiss bank Vontobel might have helped German residents set up secret accounts via a subsidiary in Liechtenstein, bringing a second bank into the focus of the scandal.

The Zurich-based bank said that "client data were neither stolen nor misappropriated from" Liechtenstein unit Vontobel Treuhand, the bulk of a statement in which one of Switzerland's best-known banks did not comment further on "rumours" of prosecutors' interest.

Inquiries have been flooding in from tax authorities worldwide as news spread of the initial German find.

Ireland, Norway, Finland and Sweden are just some of the tax agencies who have expressed their interest in seeing the list. It contains more than 4,500 items of information and, according to media reports, just 1,400 names on the list are Germans.

Sharing the data could drastically widen the scope of the investigation, already the largest of its kind in Germany history, involving eight state prosecutors and 139 tax investigators.

It has already claimed the head of Klaus Zumwinkel, former head of Deutsche Post and one of Germany's most respected executives.

The wealthy cities of Munich, Hamburg and Stuttgart have seen the largest number of raids: 34, 30 and 24 respectively.

Some 17 Frankfurt residents have had a visit from tax investigators as have as 15 homes in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, home to Düsseldorf and Cologne.

Liechtenstein authorities have attacked the investigation because it is based on stolen information.

German authorities have responded cooly, saying that it was offered the information and, in paying for it, "broke no German laws".

(Additional reporting, Financial Times service)