The Finance Minister of Germany Wolfgang Schaeuble has said on Friday that Switzerland must scrap its bank secrecy law as it has not place in the 21st century.

He defended Germany's decision to buy stolen Swiss bank data to use against tax evaders and said that the country must have an arrangement with Swiss government to share bank data. He alleged that the secrecy laws helped tax evaders in the country.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper has reported that the stolen data that Germany intends to purchase may be worth 400 million euros in revenue. The amount it said was estimated after the government investigation on the
100 samples received.

The paper also reported that 34 billion Swiss francs or 23 billion euros were deposited by around 100,000 German taxpayers in Switzerland.

Other reports in the country had indicated that the stolen data for sale possibly includes details of 1,500 tax evaders and could be worth 100 million euros in revenue. In the mean time, none of the Banks have indicated that the data was stolen from their accounts. However, some reports suggest that the data is from the second biggest Swiss bank, Credit Suisse.

Mr. Schaeuble is expected to meet his Swiss counterpart Mr. Hans-Rudolf Merz soon to discuss the matter. Switzerland has crticised the decision by Germany to purchase the stolen data. German politicians announced this week the governments' intentions to purchase the data to check evaders and boost revenues.

The issue could become a reason for contention in the diplomatic relations between the two countries. Mr. Schaeuble has said that he wants Switzerland to relax its privacy laws so that the issue could be dealt in a better manner.

Earlier in 2008 Germany had purchased stolen documents of a large Liechtenstein bank which led the officials to recover 200 million euros in unpaid taxes. This made the country to scrap its secrecy laws and later it signed a deal with Germany on tax information exchange aimed at clamping down on tax cheats.

Mr. Schaeuble also gave an opportunity to the tax evaders in the country to open up and pay the evaded taxes if they don't want to face punitive actions.