Swiss law allows the account owners to appeal before any data is turned over, so their privacy is respected until the day the Swiss court rules that the client’s case meets the criteria for “administrative assistance” under the terms of the the bilateral double taxation treaty.

In other words, the day the Swiss tax office says they do indeed appear to be committing fraud or tax evasion involving a substantial amount of money.

Nasdaq, which published a Dow-Jones article Sunday 13 November about Credit Suisse turning names over, ends with this startling sentence: “Taxpayers who challenge the release of the information are supposed to report their challenge to the US Justice Department.”

It takes a bureaucratic mind to come up with that one.

What’s that phrase, about the pot calling the kettle black?

The US Justice Department says crimes by girls have been rising and by 2004 girls’ crimes were 30 percent of the total by juvenile delinquents. Little research has been done in this area, so no one seems to know why crimes by girls are increasing, although one part of the answer could be changes to the justice system in the US.

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen where the IOC (International Olympic Committee) just awarded the 2016 Games to Rio de Janeiro, the sports group also adopted a number of recommendations. One of these is the challenging Recommendation 66: “The Olympic Movement should strengthen its partnership with the computer game industry in order to explore opportunities to encourage physical activity, and the practice and understanding of sport among the diverse population of computer game users.” (good luck!) Olympic Congress Recommendations in full

And, in a peculiarly American news approach, both Bloomberg and Associated Press have now managed to put Roman Polanski (sex crime escapee) and tax cheats (IRS tax dodgers) into bed together with a lovely duvet-style Swiss feather cover over them (read that: Switzerland and Swiss neutrality = haven for all crimes committed by right-thinking Americans, which indicates editorial confusion).

After this dubious snuggle-down, what comes out is that a) Switzerland is “no longer” a haven, which implies that it has been, for all crimes, while forgetting completely about accurate reporting and b) that Switzerland, tut-tut, will have to live like the rest of the world, which is a sign that the writers, or more probably their editors, haven’t budged since 1980. Switzerland may not be a member of the European Union, but it has adopted much of the legislation, for a start and, frankly, the days when Switzerland was an island of oddity are over. Now Switzerland is as odd as any other country around. Back in 1980 all Swiss stories published in the US had to include gold under the streets of Zurich, cheese with holes, chocolate and cuckoo clocks, even though the Swiss have tried for years to point out that cuckoo clocks are Austrian, not Swiss. As for the other three, my editors at three major US news publications all told me this, at one point or another during the early 1980s. It made for some slightly skewered reporting at the time.

Looks like some things never change, but I’m not talking about the Swiss, who have.