ZURICH: Swiss authorities on Thursday received a formal demand from the United States for information from Swiss banking giant UBS on a tax evasion probe, a government official told AFP.

"The request for help was submitted today," said a spokesman from the Federal Department of Finance.

The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had made the administrative assistance request in connection with investigations involving UBS, he added, without giving details of the request.

Switzerland would "analyse and deal with" the US request, said the spokesman, who did not indicate when the Swiss authorities were due to respond.

US investigators are looking into whether wealthy Americans had been using Swiss bank accounts to evade US income taxes on billions of dollars of assets.

But they have had to go through Swiss authorities in order to gain access to Swiss bank accounts because of Switzerland's banking secrecy laws.

The ongoing probe implicating UBS adds to the Swiss bank's headaches. It had already written down over 37 billion dollars in assets on the US sub-prime crisis.

On Wednesday, a US Senate investigative panel accused UBS and Liechtenstein bank LGT of having maintained thousands of US client accounts with billions of dollars in assets that have not been disclosed to the IRS.

"UBS alone has an estimated 19,000 accounts in Switzerland for US clients with assets valued at 18 billion dollars, and the IRS has identified at least 100 US taxpayers with accounts at LGT," the panel said in a statement.

LGT, which is owned by the Prince of Liechtenstein Foundation, denied the Senate's accusations, saying in a statement that the assets mentioned were from a time when the regulations were different.

According to the bank, the assets referred to in the report concerned confidential information on its clients that was stolen in 2002 by a former employee of LGT Treuhand.

This information went back to the 1970s, said LGT.

LGT maintained it could not be held responsible for its clients' behaviour with regard to tax authorities.


- AFP/so