Yet another firm with a Swiss business has signed a non-prosecution agreement with US authorities over undisclosed accounts.

Standard Chartered Bank's Swiss arm has signed a non-prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice over secret accounts, adding to the list of firms reaching such deals in recent months.

The Swiss unit will pay a penalty of $6.337 million under the DoJ's Swiss Bank Program, which launched in 2013 to allow Swiss banks to avoid criminal prosecution in the US by advising that they had reason to believe that they had committed tax-related criminal offences in connection with undeclared US-related accounts. SCB Switzerland agreed to cooperate in any related criminal or civil proceedings and to demonstrate its implementation of controls to stop future misconduct.

Since August 2008, SCB Switzerland held 22 US-related accounts, comprising a total of $33.1 million in assets under management. The bank helped certain US citizens evade their US tax obligations, the department said. Among other things, it agreed to hold account statements and other mail relating to some US-related accounts and provided account statements which contained only the account number in order to further ensure the secrecy of the identity of the account holder.

SCB Switzerland is now in liquidation after the Hong Kong/London-listed group, which earns most of its revenues in regions such as Asia, decided to shut down its Swiss private banking operations early last year for commercial reasons.

Since Switzerland and the US inked an agreement in August 2013, several dozen firms have signed NPAs and paid fines to the US over provision of secret accounts for Americans. The US Department of Justice programme has a number of options under which Swiss firms can elect to state if they do, or do not, think they had a risk of having violated US laws regarding undisclosed accounts. The move comes amid widespread expectation that by 2018, at the latest, Swiss bank secrecy will in all practical senses cease to exist.