Germany has handed Athens the names of more than 10,000 of its citizens suspected of dodging taxes with holdings in Swiss banks.
The inventory, which details bank accounts worth €3.6bn – almost twice the last instalment of aid Athens secured from creditors earlier this week – was given to the Greek finance ministry in an effort to help the country raise tax revenues.
“This is an important step for the Greek government to create more honesty regarding tax in the country,” said Norbert Walter-Borjans, finance minister of the regional state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The state disclosed the data through Germany’s federal tax office.
Greece’s leftist-led government vowed it would go after tax dodgers as one of the many policy commitments it signed up to when a €86bn bailout between Athens and its partners was agreed after months of wrangling in July.
The financial lifeline was the third since Athens’ near economic meltdown following the first revelations of runaway deficits in May 2010.
A total of 10,588 depositors were said to be on the list, including private individuals and companies. Sources said it resembled a “who’s who” of the well-heeled upper echelons of Greek society - able to spend Christmas in villas in Gstaad in Switzerland and summer at sea in luxury pleasure boats.
Prime minister Alexis Tsipras, who won snap polls in September pledging to do away with the “old order”, has promised to dismantle Greece’s oligarchical establishment.
Mired in a sixth year of recession, with unprecedented levels of poverty and unemployment, it is ordinary Greeks hit by ever-increasing taxes who have borne the brunt of the country’s long-running economic crisis.
New levies are at the basis of the savings Athens agreed to make in exchange for its latest international bailout. With affluent Greeks spiriting their money abroad, the German chancellor Angela Merkel has seen fit to publicly chastise them for failing to pitch in.
Tryfon Alexiadis , the deputy finance minister in charge of tax revenues, said the list would be acted on as quickly as possible - even if the government had to assume the innocence of those revealed to be on it.
“It will not stay in a drawer for three years,” he told reporters outside parliament on Wednesday. “The list will be evaluated and we will see what is hidden behind it. All the services of the ministry of finance and the ministry of justice will cooperate so that we have results as soon as possible.”
In October 2010 Greece was given a similar inventory by Christine Lagarde, then French finance minister, of more 2,000 Greeks with deposits at the Geneva branch of HSBC.
Successive governments did little to follow up on it with Tsipras accusing predecessors of deliberately keeping the data in a drawer.
Estimated at more than $35bn a year, tax dodging is thought to be the biggest drain on the Greek economy.
Last month, Alexiadis got a letter in the post with a bullet in it and a note comparing him to a collaborator with Germany’s Nazi forces. Berlin has been the biggest contributor of the 326bn in bailout funding Athens has received to date.
( Guardian Service)
