European summit on bank secrecy looks like more empty rhetoric

All the talk in Europe about ending decades of bizarre bank secrecy rules aimed at protecting trillions of dollars hoarded by the world's richest families is only that -- more talk. Sunday's international conference in Luxembourg is designed to create the impression of progress, even though the holders of all that wealth have no intention of being exposed nor of paying taxes on more than a tiny portion of it. The conference brings together the finance ministers of Switzerland, the world's leader in secret offshore accounts, and Luxembourg and Austria, the European Union secrecy leaders, according to the Reuters international news service. Ministers from Lichtenstein, a longtime money secrecy haven that recently embraced transparency, and Germany also are expected to attend. "This meeting will chiefly be about tax evasion and how to tackle it cross-border," a person with knowledge of the agenda told Reuters. "It will be about bank secrecy, but there is no common position as yet." Germany has joined with the United States in efforts to crack the bank secrecy wall to increase government tax receipts. Of course, it would be a lot more reassuring if the countries could agree on bank transparency because it's the proper thing to do, and regard the increased tax collections as a secondary -- although substantial -- benefit. If ordinary people have to pay taxes every year on their holdings, why should the super-rich be able to hide behind archaic secrecy rules to escape their share? They are, after all, the largest beneficiaries of laws and traditions protecting private ownership. Then again, doing away with these secrecy regimes will by implication peel away the senseless protection enjoyed by the perpetrators of one of modern society's greatest evils -- the confiscation of wealth from countries all over the world by the Nazis in World War II. Until the banks are willing or are forced to reveal what happened to all of that wealth -- or, if it's gone, who made off with it -- protestations about reining in secrecy laws won't amount to anything worthwhile.

U.S. prosecutions expected in wake of UBS deal

At least the recent deal between the U.S. Justice Department and the giant Swiss bank UBS will result in more money for the deficit-ridden U.S. Treasury. U.S. prosecutors have opened 150 investigations against 150 U.S. citizens they believe were helped by Swiss bankers to avoid taxes on $20 billion in assets held in Europe, Central America and the Caribbean. Under the terms of the deal, a major dent in previously inviolate Swiss banking secrecy laws, 5,000 additional owners of hidden assets are expected to be revealed, according to the Reuters international news service. But Swiss bankers are believed to be still be hiding the identities of 10,000-15,000 more depositors from the United States with possibly hundreds of billions more in assets. Those names are not expected to be revealed in the current case, in which UBS also agreed to pay $780 million in fines. This apparently means that the United States has backed away from permanently neutering Switzerland's banking secrecy tradition, which has no place in the evolving global economy. It also looks like the United States has failed use the case to right one of the great festering wrongs from World War II, and force Swiss bankers to reveal the locations and amounts of money and assets stolen from victims of the Nazi conquest of Europe. Why Swiss banks should continue to be exempt from common human decency defies explanation. And, yet, even the world's most powerful nations seem to quiver at the prospect of correcting this indecency. In fact, if not for the testimony of one former UBS banker turned whistleblower, there may have been no case. That banker, Bradley Birkenfeld of South Boston, formerly of Geneva, pleaded guilty in 2008 to helping a South Florida billionaire hide $200 million in assets from U.S. tax authorities. Birkenfeld agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for a lighter prison sentence.