Data leaks Many Finns have been hiding their money in Switzerland for decades – the first big powers to rule last year

Switzerland has been a favorite of Finnish families and individuals as well, when money and other assets have been hidden from the authorities. The first big users of economic power in Finland – albeit only in 2021 – have also been convicted of Swiss deposits and trading.

On Sunday several media outlets reported the leak, where the account information of tens of thousands of Swiss bank Credit Suisse customers has ended up in the media. The leaked data are said to relate to accounts that were in use from the 1940s to the 2010s.

According to The New York Times, the data reveals how Credit Suisse opened accounts and served people with clearly problematic backgrounds. Credit Suisse has also been a bank for Finnish tax haven depositors.

In Finland the cases that have emerged so far have shown that families and individuals, with the help of Swiss banks, have failed to pay wealth and income taxes for decades. Wealth tax was abolished in 2006, but according to HS reports, Finns have had Swiss accounts since at least the 1950s.

Helsingin Sanomat’s information is not based on information leaks, but on tax haven proceedings in Finnish district courts and courts of appeal.

In an extensive article in October, Helsingin Sanomat described how Finns have used tax havens, mainly in Switzerland, to avoid paying taxes. The money was hidden from the taxpayer, but there were other reasons.

The CEO of a large Nordic company took his funds to Switzerland in the 1960s because “conditions in Finland were unstable”.

Read more: The hidden property was revealed

Genealogy the hides were revealed for the most part in Switzerland, which began to open its strict banking secrecy around 2013 in the face of coercion. With Switzerland thus out of the bill, those interested in tax evasion had to come up with new countries for their arrangements.

In December, Helsingin Sanomat reported on the latest arrangements, in which Switzerland could only be part of a more complex arrangement to hide funds.

Read more: Central Finland sales manager spends millions of euros in tax havens and fails to pay more than 700,000 euros in taxes – No jail time if prosecuted

The first The big Finnish powers have been convicted of their Swiss deposits and trading last year.

The most well-known tax haven depositor to date is the former CEO of the shipping company Finnlines and the former CEO of Nokia Antti Lagerroos, who received one year in prison for aggravated tax fraud. The verdict is not final, as Lagerroos has appealed to the Court of Appeal.

Read more: Former CEO of a listed company hiding its funds in a tax haven received a year’s probation – Deny of charges of aggravated tax fraud

Industry Adviser Keijo Kopra, in turn, was convicted of aggravated tax fraud later in the year. The two-year suspended prison sentence handed down to Kopra became final last December when he did not appeal the district court’s verdict to the Court of Appeal.

According to the decision of the District Court, Kopra concealed a total of EUR 4.7 million in capital income from Switzerland and interest income from Finland. In this way, he tried to avoid taxes of more than 1.4 million euros.

Kopra had encrypted deposits from the taxpayer in a total of 12 accounts in Switzerland with both Credit Suisse and UBS.

Read more: Industry council receives two years’ probation for tax fraud – Revenue of € 4.7 million in revenue

In Finland at least one case of tax havens involving Switzerland is also pending, which has advanced to the Supreme Court asti.

A woman living in Finland inherited a Swiss bank account from her father in 1971. The account was apparently established as early as the 1950s.

The woman should have paid taxes to Finland, but in her own words did not know it. According to the Court of Appeal, the woman’s intention was not to avoid taxes.

The Supreme Court (KKO) granted the prosecutor to determine whether the taxpayer was required to be aware of his own income.

Finland Towards the end of the year, the taxpayer calculated that Helsingin Sanomat had revealed hidden income of approximately EUR 200 million in 2018–2021. Once the hidden income has been taxed, it has generated an estimated tax revenue of EUR 60 million over four years.

Most of the hidden income, about 180 million euros has been revealed in the so-called Ultra group, which monitors, among other things, foreign transactions, ie money transfers. These include insurance envelope schemes whose income has not been disclosed to the taxpayer by their owners.

In addition to Ultra’s tax audits, the international automatic exchange of financial account information (CRS) has generated income gains of just over EUR 14 million in personal taxation. The control of cross-border cash flows, on the other hand, has brought in just over 10 million euros.

Automatic The expansion of the CRS information exchange has broken down, especially in the so-called traditional banking secrecy states, where the taxpayer has received very few tax returns in the past.

For example, less than ten years ago, Swiss banks informed their customers that they would start telling the Finnish tax authorities about their income streams. This led in Finland Juha Sipilän a (central) government project in which those with hidden incomes would have received a tax cut, prosecution, and the opportunity to hide their names from the public.

The project caused many tax haven depositors to tell their taxpayer about their assets in advance before the amnesty law was passed. When the Sipilä government’s project collapsed, the taxpayer had to file criminal reports with the police.