Klaus Zumwinkel Former Deutsche Post chief	Jan Kees de Jager Deputy Finance Minister

By Ben Berkowitz

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The Dutch government says it has received a list of hundreds of people who have evaded taxes with secret accounts at banks, including some in the Cayman Islands, and it plans to pay off the informant who slipped it the information.

The deal echoes an early 2008 case in Germany, where the government purchased data on tax evaders from an informant about clients of a Liechtenstein bank.

The German case snared former Deutsche Post chief Klaus Zumwinkel, who was given a suspended jail term in January for evading nearly $1.47 million in taxes using a Liechtenstein trust.

In a statement late on Saturday, the Dutch government said it received the names, addresses, account numbers and phone numbers of several hundred of what the government calls “zwartspaarders”, or “black savers.”

“This is a group of tax- payers which knowingly has been evading taxes for years with large sums of money,” Deputy Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager said in a letter to parliament.

A source familiar with the situation said there were nearly 500 people on the list. Their accounts were primarily in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, the source said, with some accounts also found in Liechtenstein and Luxembourg.

The finance ministry declined to comment on the contents of the list.

The tax office has already started sending letters to some of the savers demanding an explanation. The accounts average around 200,000 euros each, with the largest ones in the tens of millions of euros.

The tipster will be paid based on how accurate the data ends up being and how much revenue is collected, with the payoff capped at “several hundred thousand euros.” The government is concealing the name and nationality of the informant.

De Jager said negotiations with the informant started early this year, and that the deal was signed on September 16 after the reliability of the information was tested and government lawyers weighed in on its usability.

The government has been running a system to let undeclared overseas savers reveal themselves and pay a fine, rather than face criminal prosecution. Since early this year 3,000 people have disclosed more than US$1 billion euros in assets, De Jager said.

Though the amnesty will continue into next year, starting January 1 anyone who discloses an account will have to pay a 10 percent fine in addition to their back taxes. The source said the government expects to find people on the list who have already disclosed one account, but have others hidden.