A-35-30

Bank accounts held by a lawyer may contain information protected by professional secrecy, which must not be disclosed to a foreign state in the context of administrative assistance in tax matters. This must be assumed to be the case for client accounts opened using Form R, but it is also possible that other accounts held by the lawyer may contain protected information. These are the principles laid down by the Federal Court in a ruling 2C_116/2023 of 2 May 2025[...]

On February 19, 2025, the Federal Council sent the message to Parliament concerning the project to extend the automatic international exchange of information in tax matters (AIE) to crypto-assets (the Message) by adopting a framework for the declaration of crypto-assets (CDA). In addition to the CDC, the Message proposes additions and amendments to the law (P-LEAR) and the ordinance (P-OEAR) on the automatic exchange of information. The new rules are expected to come into force on January 1, 2026, for[...]

In a ruling intended for publication, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, against the advice of the Federal Tax Administration, exempts a holding company from stamp duty (i) in the case of an intra-group transfer of shareholdings that do not meet the restructuring conditions set out in the LIFD and (ii) following the granting of shareholdings to employees free of charge (9C_168/2023, 9C_176/2023 of 25 November 2024). The case concerns a holding company carrying out two transactions which the Federal Tax[...]

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court has ruled that tax secrecy takes precedence over the principle of transparency (ruling intended for publication 1C_272/2022, delivered in open court by four votes to one). The origin of this ruling lies in the request of the NGO Society for Threatened Peoples, based on the Transparency Act (LTrans). The NGO was asking the Federal Office of Customs and Border Protection (FOCB) for access to detailed statistics on gold imports by major Swiss importers, for the[...]