President Sends Lagarde List to Parliament for Transparency - Spokesman

President Nicos Anastasiades has sent the Lagarde List - a list of Cypriots with HSBC Swiss bank accounts - to Parliament for the sake of transparency, and to make sure that none of the information on it is changed, said Government Spokesman Nicos Christodoulides.

House Speaker Yiannakis Omirou is responsible for keeping the list confidential, said the spokesman. But, as history shows, if there is one way of ensuring that confidential information will leak, it's by giving it to the House of Representatives.

The Lagarde List is the names of suspected tax dodgers held by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) includes Cypriots who hold a total of 647 million US dollars in HSBC's private bank in Geneva.

Cyprus ranks number 56 on the list of countries with accounts in the bank, according to the ICIJ, which has not published an itemised list, although there is pressure for them to do so and reveal all to the public.

Holding a Swiss bank account is not in itself illegal, but the lists have been used by tax authorities around the world to prosecute those who have illegally removed funds from their originating countries in order to avoid taxes.

There are a total of 171 countries on the list, which is headed by a number of residents in Sweden and Barbados, with one billion dollars each held in accounts at HSBC.

Almost 60,000 files were leaked to the media and tax authorities after a former employee of HSBC bank - Hervé Falciani - copied them and kept them in his home, which was raided by police in 2009.

In the most recent developments, a Greek entrepreneur on the Lagarde List paid half-a-million euros in fines to avoid criminal charges.