Luxembourg and Austria are the only EU countries that, for reasons of bank secrecy, do not automatically submit information about accounts held by residents of other EU countries at their banks upon court request.

“We want to strengthen cooperation with foreign tax authorities. International developments are moving towards the automatic exchange of banking information. We are no longer completely against it,” said Frieden at Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. As an example of information Luxembourg can provide to EU countries where account holders come from, he mentions interest payments to bank clients.

Despite increasing pressure from foreign partners, Austria will not change its approach to bank secrecy because the situation does not require it, said Gregor Schütze, a spokesman for the Austrian Ministry of Finance, responding to Luxembourg’s new position.

He asked France and Germany to break banking secrecy

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, his French counterpart Pierre Moscovici and the European Commission recently called for a crackdown on banking secrecy in Luxembourg and Austria.

Austrian Finance Minister Maria Fekterová said on Friday that she would prefer bilateral agreements, such as Austria signed with Switzerland in April 2012 and with Liechtenstein in January this year. “It makes it possible to tax accounts without breaking bank secrecy,” said the conservative politician. “People have the right to protect their savings accounts not only at the monetary level, but also from the over-disclosure that would occur with the automatic exchange of bank information,” added the Austrian minister.

In 2010, the European Parliament warned that without breaking bank secrecy in the Union and without introducing an automatic exchange of information on income tax and VAT between individual countries, the state treasury would lose around 200 billion euros (about 5.1 trillion crowns) annually due to to avoid taxes. .