Tax-news.com reported last week on the headline-hitting French report, in which parliamentarians Vincent Peillon and Arnuad Montebourg said Swiss efforts to fight money laundering were a "sham". Yet the report is rapidly turning out to be a bit of a damp squib, with the French government reportedly distancing itself from it, and the Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) launching a stinging counter-attack, saying the report's conclusions are based on a "seriously-flawed analysis".
The French foreign ministry has apparently issued a statement effectively dismissing the findings of the report, saying Switzerland had demonstrated that it was committed to tackling financial crime. Peillon and Montebourg, however, had derided Switzerland as a "predator in world finance".
The SBA attacked the report’s main author, Arnaud Montebourg, charging that he and his team "came to Switzerland with their eyes shut with the sole purpose of confirming their own prejudices". The SBA said that it had made a detailed examination of the 400-page French report into Switzerland's anti-money laundering measures, and found it to be "full of mistakes and the end result of false premises, a careless methodology and a disregard for facts".
Indeed, the SBA is in supremely defensive mode, and last week responded immediately to "correct the most blatant examples" of errors in the Montebourg report. The SBA said the report's claim that Swiss banks do not have to identify the beneficial owner with regard to accounts opened before July 1998 was "absolutely false". It also took issue with the report for implying that Switzerland is a haven for companies and individuals seeking to evade tax. The SBA said: ' This view is not shared by important international organisations. Switzerland does not appear on the OECD list of tax havens published in June 2000, neither was it on the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering list of uncooperative jurisdictions.'
The SBA concluded its red-hot counter attack by implying that France's own money laundering legislation was lax, so the Montebourg report was in no way in the position to criticise Switzerland. The report had charged that Swiss anti-money laundering laws were not up to international standards, particularly those of the EU. The SBA had this to say: 'Swiss legislation applies to all financial intermediaries (including lawyers, attorneys-at-law, hotel owners, jewellers etc). This is a good place to mention that on 24 January 2001, the French parliament decided not to include lawyers as being subject to anti-money laundering legislation.'
Whilst important bodies such as the SBA must feel they have a duty to defend Switzerland in the face of such criticism, it is questionable as to whether the Montebourg report will really have that big an impact. If the French persist with their penchant for releasing reports on money laundering (it's only a matter of months since Monaco was the target), people might just begin to take what they say with a pinch of salt......
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