By Huw Jones and Philip Blenkinsop
LUXEMBOURG, March 18 (Reuter) - Luxembourg will not dilute its bank secrecy rules and is against hasty changes to European Union law that taxes foreign savings, the Grand Duchy's Treasury Minister Luc Frieden said.
Countries used by investors to salt away cash outside their home state have come under the spotlight since a spat developed between Germany and neighboring Liechtenstein, which is not a member of the 27-nation EU.
Many wealthy Germans were found to have parked money in the tiny Alpine tax haven to avoid the taxman back home.
Germany persuaded the EU's executive European Commission bring forward a review of the bloc's savings tax directive to May in a bid to make it harder for investors to escape the net.
The 2005 rules only tax cash deposits while trusts, stocks and bonds are outside their scope, but Luxembourg won't be rushed.
"I'm amazed that some people want to change this directive even before having had any evaluation about how the current system works," Frieden told the Reuters Funds Summit.
The current directive took years to agree as unanimity among all the bloc's members is needed in tax matters.
Luxembourg, Austria and Belgium won the right to a watered down version in return for introducing a withholding tax.
"The system of withholding tax works well. We transfer quite an impressive amount of tax to other member states of the European Union. I think we should not change things again that work well," Frieden said.
The Grand Duchy's Central Bank Governor, Yves Mersch, said the privacy laws were widely supported in Luxembourg and the EU should focus instead on tackling cross-border abuses.
"At the European level we should move to attack unlawful activities, which are only being made possible through borders, but then we must not lose our priorities," Mersch told Reuters.
"Bank secrecy is for me part of our social consensus because confidentiality in a small country is extremely important for the maintenance of democratic rule. In larger countries you can have checks and balances through a multiplication of institutions which control each other," Mersch said.
FOCUS ON THIRD COUNTRIES
Frieden said Luxembourg was making sure that what he terms banking confidentiality did not lead to abuses.
"If we reopen this discussion, it will be a very difficult discussion on how we deal with trusts, on how we deal with dividends. The last discussions lasted for eight or ten years, these ones would last for even longer," Frieden. Continued...
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