What €2.5 Million Buys You

You can buy a lot with €2.5 Million. That’s about $3.41 million, about the salary of a typical major league baseball player. It can also buy you one cd, normally priced at about $0.35 (or about €0.26). Why the mark-up? The data on the cd, of course.

The German government bought the cd; it supposedly has information on 1,500 individuals who have evaded German taxes at Credit Suisse’s Zurich offices. The Süddeutsche Zeitung says that the cd contains information on 1,500 individuals evading €400 Million. (It’s unclear from the news story whether that’s €400 Million in income or tax being evaded.)

The files on the cd were allegedly stolen from Credit Suisse. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Finance Minister, noted that when similar data was purchased on Liechtenstein it resulted in 200 court cases, including the conviction of the former chairman of Deutsche Post, Klaus Zumwinkel. There is some good news for Germany. This cd cost only €2.5 Million; the Liechtenstein data cost €4 Million. It appears that the price for data on German tax evaders is falling.

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