Switzerland has handed over data on some 4,000 UBS clients to the United States, the government announced Tuesday. In return, the Swiss government said Washington had dropped a key summons against the bank. Switzerland last year agreed to relax its traditional banking confidentiality rules after coming under heavy pressure from major trading partners.

A court case was opened in the summer of 2008 against UBS in the US, on charges that the bank's employees helped wealthy clients illegally evade paying taxes. In a statement, the Swiss Federal Department of Finance said the so-called John Does Summons on UBS, the world's second largest wealth manager, was "fully and definitively withdrawn" after the delivery of the data. A UBS spokesman said "this represent the final formal step in the resolution in the US cross-border matter."

Copyright Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 2010