On September 7, 2021, the German newspaper Die Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), citing documents from the Federal Ministry of Finance of the Federal Republic of Germany, published an article claiming that at least 222 billion euros are kept by the Germans abroad, at least 11.9 billion of them were withdrawn to "tax haven "on the island of Guernsey, a comparable amount - to Liechtenstein, to the Cayman Islands - about 8.5 billion euros.
The data was taken from the request of the left faction in the Bundestag. They are based on a new automatic exchange of financial information: the countries participating in the exchange inform each other about the balances on the accounts of their taxpayers. Classic tax evasion using a simple numbered invoice becomes much more difficult because domestic tax authorities later automatically learn about foreign assets through this exchange.
On the one hand, the data records stored in the exchange can be added or corrected, so the figures quoted may change, stresses the German Federal Ministry of Finance. This is exactly what happened with the statistics that became known last year: at that time the ministry wrote that the Germans had 180.8 billion euros in their Jersey bank accounts. This number for 2018 was later sharply adjusted downward by Jersey, announced by the Federal Treasury Department on 6 September. Jersey reported three billion euros for 2017 and 2019.
On the other hand, 17 governments objected to the fact that the statistics on the datasets they report, should be made public. Among them are Switzerland, Bermuda, Isle of Man and San Marino tax havens. Data from Switzerland and Bermuda can be viewed by members of the secret protection service (analogue of the FSO) of the Bundestag, which at least allows some parliamentary control to be exercised, even if the statistics remain secret.
The smaller Caribbean tax havens of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica are not on the list of countries with automatic exchange. The datasets transmitted by them could not yet be processed "due to technical problems".
