Roundup: Macedonia launches investigation on possible tax evasion through Swiss branch of HSBC bank

Macedonian authorities opened an investigation on Wednesday, following the reports that Macedonian citizens have used Swiss banking accounts to evade taxes.

Nine Macedonian citizens and companies had secret bank accounts in the Swiss branch of the HSBC bank, documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have shown.

According to the documents, they owned 15 banking accounts with a total sum of 164 million U.S. dollars stashed on them.

"After the published media reports, the information was immediately forwarded to the Public Prosecution in Charge of Investigating Organized Crime and Corruption for further investigation," the Public Prosecution Office in Skopje informed Xinhua on Wednesday.

The investigation should establish if the banking accounts are legal according Macedonian law and if they have been used for tax evasion.

The Macedonian Bureau for Financial Investigation expects to reveal the names of the account holders in order to initiate its own investigation.

"Even if we gather the names of the persons and the companies unofficially, we will launch a procedure to establish if the capital on these banking accounts is accumulated through legal channels," the Bureau informed on Wednesday.

According to Macedonian laws, Macedonian citizens can own bank accounts in foreign banks if they live or have a company abroad or only with a specific permission issued by the Central Bank of Macedonia.

Experts advise that in-depth investigation is necessary because the authorities have to prevent tax evasion, but the capital can't be marked as "criminal" in advance.

"If we have reasons of doubt that the money are 'controversial', if the established assets do not correspond to the personal income of certain person, then the institutions can and must react," Nikola Tupanchevski, a professor of Criminal Law in Skopje told Xinhua on Wednesday.

The data published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists are based on 60,000 banking documents for HSBC clients from all over the world, for the period up until 2007.

According to them, Macedonia is near the top of the list in the Western Balkans if you compare the sum of money held by its citizens in HSBC. On global level, the country is ranked 89th out of over 200 countries and regions in the report. One of the nine singled out Macedonians with bank accounts in this bank owns 54.6 million dollars.

In the region, Bulgarian citizens allegedly own a total of 380 million dollars in HSBC banking accounts, Serbians 46.6 million, Croatian citizens 33.2 million, Slovenian 24.5 million and citizens from Montenegro 7.5 million dollars. Many of these countries, such as Croatia, Serbia, also Britain and the United States, have announced that they will explore the reports that their citizens have used this bank for tax evasion schemes.

The HSBC bank has admitted omissions in the work in its Swiss branch. The revealed documents show that the bank has allowed its clients, 100,000 people and 20,000 offshore companies, tax evasion of over 180 billion dollars. Endit