Suspect in Swiss Tax Data Sale to Germany Found Dead in Suspected Suicide
An Austrian man held in connection with the theft of Swiss bank-account details and their sale to Germany is believed to have killed himself in prison.
Guards at a regional jail in the Swiss capital of Bern discovered the 42-year-old man dead in his cell on Sept. 29 as they came to bring him breakfast, the Swiss federal prosecutor’s office said in an e-mailed statement. He had been detained since mid-September on suspicion of economic espionage, it said.
The suspect, who wasn’t identified, was held in an investigation into the alleged theft of client data from Swiss banks, which were subsequently sold to German tax investigators, prosecution spokeswoman Jeanette Balmer said today by e-mail. Officials in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said in August they were using information from an informant to identify possible tax dodgers who stashed funds in Switzerland.
“As far as could be determined so far, no third party was involved,” the prosecutor’s statement said. “A suicide seems likely.”
The suspect was an Austrian national, Austria’s foreign ministry spokesman, Harald Stranzl, said by telephone from the capital, Vienna.
The man, a native of the Tyrol region of Austria who lived in the Swiss town of Winterthur, sold information on 2,000 account holders of a Swiss bank to the German tax authorities, the Vienna-based Krone newspaper reported, citing unidentified Swiss and German secret-service officials.
To contact the reporter on this story: Carolyn Bandel in Zurich at cbandel@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Frank Connelly at fconnelly@bloomberg.net
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