New Labour snooping.

Not content with prying into each aspect of our lives here in the UK, New Labour have decided that its all jolly good to pry into our lives abroad. So from the "you could not make it up files"...

The British tax authorities have paid an informant for the bank details of scores of wealthy Britons. The records were stolen from one of the world’s most secretive tax havens.

HM Revenue & Customs paid £100,000 for data that it is using to launch investigations of up to 100 British citizens who have accounts at Liechtenstein’s biggest bank.

**Right so they pay some snoop taxpayers money to get details of what our citizens may have squirreled away in a Liechtenstein bank for a rainy day.

British authorities regard it as a coup to have penetrated accounts that have been beyond their reach for decades. “There will be many frightened people who thought Liechtenstein was secure,” said a City accountant.

Anyone found to have evaded tax faces fines of up to 100% of the money owed to the Revenue and, where deliberate deception is proved, a jail sentence of up to seven years.

The bank informant has already provoked a storm in Germany by selling data on 750 wealthy Germans’ accounts to the country’s intelligence service for £3.2m in January last year.

Homes and offices of dozens of suspected tax evaders in Germany have since been raided.

The suspected whistleblower, accused of stealing data from the bank, was sacked and convicted of fraud. He also offered data to tax authorities in America, Canada, Australia and France.

**So we have HM Customs paying money to someone sacked for fraud, yet not a one of the people employed by HM Customs sees the slightest moral problem with that? After all someone might be doing something that they don't know about, so far better to let them know the state is in charge.

That said after losing the data of 25million+ people any thing they do must look like a positive improvement.

The New Labour big brother state just keeps on growing.

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