Switzerland soon without secret accounts - Withdrawal of up to 200 billion Swiss francs expected

UBS expects Swiss banks to see European clients withdraw "hundreds of billions of francs" as a result of steps to stop foreigners using secret accounts to evade taxes.

Juerg Zeltner, head of UBS wealth management, reiterated an estimate he gave in May that Switzerland's biggest bank could see outflows of 12-30 billion Swiss francs ($12.8-31.9 billion) from total European assets under management of over 300 billion, Reuters reports.

- As a consequence of the realignment of the financial centre and the planned withholding tax, we assume that a total of hundreds of billions of francs will flow out of Switzerland - he told the Schweizer Bank magazine in an interview on Monday.

German financial services consultancy Zeb/Rolfes Schierenbeck Associates estimates Swiss banks could see European clients pull up to 200 billion francs by 2016 of the 789 billion it believes they currently hold in untaxed assets.

Zeltner's comments come just days after Credit Suisse, Switzerland's second biggest bank, said it expected clients in western Europe to withdraw up to $37 billion in the next few years due to pressure on the tax issue.

Swiss bank secrecy - which has helped the country build a $2 trillion offshore financial centre dominated by UBS and Credit Suisse - has come under heavy fire in recent years as cash-strapped governments elsewhere have sought to fight tax evasion.