Berlin set for 400-mln euro windfall in Swiss tax affair: report

(FRANKFURT) - Information on German tax cheats could see Berlin recover 400 million euros (550 million dollars) in back taxes, a press report said on Friday.

The estimate is based on calculations by tax inspectors of around 100 bank account files contained in a compact disc that showed many tax dodgers had hidden "considerable" sums of money, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily said.

According to several sources, the data comes from the second biggest Swiss bank, Credit Suisse, the report said.

An "internal estimation" by the bank determined that as many as 100,000 German taxpayers have deposited up to 34 billion Swiss francs (23 billion euros, 31 billion dollars) in Switzerland, the newspaper said.

"More than 80 percent of Germans who have placed money in Credit Suisse accounts in Switzerland have hidden the interest from (German) tax officials," the report quoted a 2004 bank report as saying.

An anonymous informer has offered to sell Germany information on 1,500 people suspected of hiding money in Switzerland, for 2.5 million euros.

Germany Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said Tuesday he was ready to buy the information and urged tax frauders to turn themselves in before they were found out.

The saga has prompted a high-profile debate in Germany about paying for illicit data as well as a souring of its relations with Switzerland.

In 2008, a similar deal netted a long list of names and bank accounts in the alpine principality of Liechtenstein which let officials recover unpaid taxes and led to the arrest of the head of the logistics group Deutsche Post.

In September, Liechtenstein revealed it has since signed a deal with Germany on tax information exchange aimed at clamping down on tax cheats.