Anglo-Swiss tax deal branded a disgrace

She said the agreement, which will allow a one-off payment to be collected from taxpayers' bank accounts in Switzerland along with a withholding tax, was morally and ethically wrong. Tax avoiders and the people who advise them are like the asset strippers and predators mentioned by Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, she added.

The UK has to make ethical and moral judgements on things that have carried on for far too long. An enormous industry has grown up to make tax avoidance profitable and we need to revisit the ethical and moral issues that appear to have been forgotten, she concluded.

HMRC has been defending the anonymity part of the Swiss agreement by explaining that it would have taken at least ten years to break the nation's banking secrecy laws. Critics of the deal that international pressure would have forced the Swiss to remove the anonymity veil eventually but Dave Hartnett, HMRC's permanent secretary for tax told a Treasury sub-committee last week that it was very unlikely for that to happen within the next ten years.

A lot of people have been highly critical of the deal suggesting that the one-off repayment is letting tax evaders off paying much larger bills. Normally tax evasion would incur large penalties as well as having to pay the tax owed. Furthermore, the tax rates applied to bank accounts in Switzerland are slightly lower than the rates levied in the UK. Hartnett explained that this was because the tax would be deducted earlier in the year than it is in the UK.

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