Reports say German state buys CD containing data of Swiss bank clients

German authorities in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) have bought a CD containing data about several thousand German clients of a Swiss bank.

According to German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, each of the clients has an account containing up to €5m at an unidentified bank and NRW tax investigators were currently analysing the data.

Over the last four years, NRW has bought a number of CDs containing data of tax evaders and almost 19,000 tax evaders in have declared themselves to authorities, while the number of tax offenders turning themselves in has also increased in other German states.

The newspaper also said over the last seven days there had been several raids on the unreported income of clients of Credit Suisse in NRW related to a tax CD that NRW authorities bought in 2012.