Lisbon gets list of Swiss Leaks tax cheats

Portugal has received information on 611 taxpayers listed in the Swiss Leaks affair. The total amount of money in question is $969 million (CHF 924 million).

As Portuguese Secretary of State for Fiscal Affairs Paulo Nuncio told a parliamentary committee on Friday, the list of Portuguese nationals who may hold accounts with the Swiss subsidiary of British bank HSBC “will be cross-checked with information already available to the Portuguese tax authorities”.

Thanks to a 2012 agreement to share information with Switzerland, Lisbon already has some of the relevant data on Portuguese account holders.

The Swiss HSBC subsidiary has been at the centre of a huge scandal this month after several media outlets reported that it had helped some of its clients to hide billions of dollars to avoid paying taxes.

Dubbed Swiss Leaks, the list came from HSBC files stolen by former employee Hervé Falciani in 2007. These files contain information on 100,000 bank customers, and they ended up in the hands of the French authorities after they raided Falciani’s home..

Like Portugal, many countries have asked France to provide a list of nationals mentioned in these files.