ROME: Italians with Swiss accounts will have to pay 7 percent to 12 percent of their secret assets in taxes. An agreement allowing the two nations to share information that was signed Monday means Italy will remove Switzerland from a black list, enabling Italians to come clean on undeclared Swiss funds on better terms and keep their money where it is. Italians with Swiss accounts will have to pay 7 percent to 12 percent of their secret assets in taxes
Italy is counting on a voluntary disclosure program to flush out undeclared assets estimated at about 160 billion euros ($181 billion). While there are no official figures for how much of the hidden money may be in Switzerland, more than two-thirds of funds that surfaced in Italy’s most recent amnesty were from the Alpine nation, a sign of the potential hit to Swiss banks.
The deal gives the asset managers, already grappling with costly investigations from the U.S. to France, a chance to retain clients even as bank secrecy is abandoned.
“This agreement is very good for Swiss banks. We needed it desperately,” said Lars Schlichting, a partner and attorney at KPMG Holding AG in Lugano, Switzerland. “Without it we could have lost all Italian clients because we cannot have undeclared money anymore.”
and penalties if they voluntarily disclose them to the authorities, compared with as much as 40 percent if Switzerland hadn’t reached the agreement, Schlichting estimated.
