Spain recovers taxes from hidden Swiss accounts

 

The Spanish government has recovered over €260 million in taxes owed from undeclared assets kept by secret by Spanish citizens in Swiss bank accounts.

A number of clients of HSBC in Switzerland voluntarily declared their accounts after it was revealed that data from the bank was stolen and sunsequently passed onto the investigators.

The stolen data revealed the names of 659 Spanish citizens who held a total of 3,000 Swiss accounts.

Just under half of those the people involved had acted to declare these accounts before the amnesty with the tax authorities came to an end in June of this year, the budgetary secretary of state told the Spanish parliament's economic commission.

Those who have not yet come forward have been given a final warning by the government. Around 100 people have not responded to notices from the government.

Sensitive client data was stolen from the Geneva branch of HSBC by a former disgruntled IT employee three years ago and sold on to the authorities in France. France has offered the HSBC data to several other European countries.

HSBC admitted in March that the theft affected around 15,000 Swiss client accounts.