The “unthinkable” has happened, said Gerd Zitzelsberger in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. The Swiss have “capitulated to American pressure” and compromised their famous principle of banking secrecy. It was a matter of self-preservation. Switzerland’s UBS, the world’s largest bank geared toward the super-rich, was facing criminal charges in the U.S. that it had helped Americans evade taxes. To settle those charges, the bank agreed last week to pay a fine of $780 million and—ominously, for Switzerland—to hand over the names and account information of some 300 rich Americans. Washington has, in effect, “blown a hole in Swiss banking secrecy the size of a barn door.” And everyone else wants to stampede through the opening. Already, Britain and other E.U. countries have begun arguing that if Switzerland can bend its secrecy rules for the Americans, it can bend them for others.
UBS has just set a terrible precedent, said Viviane Menétrey and Fabian Muhieddine in Switzerland’s Le Matin. Bank officials rolled over in fear after Washington threatened to take away its U.S. license and levy additional hefty fines that the troubled bank could not possibly afford. But Swiss regulators should have instructed UBS to wait for a ruling from the Swiss courts—which, as it turned out, would have placed an injunction on the release of bank customers’ data. By the time the court ruled, though, UBS had already delivered the information to Washington. Switzerland would rather “give in to pressure from the U.S. instead of defending tooth and nail one of the main strengths of our financial industry.”
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