Does Barack Obama's election as US President bode ill for Swiss banking secrecy, recently underfire, yet again, from the German Finance Minister Peer Steinbruck who suggested that Switzerland be added to the OECD black list of un-cooperative countries?

As a US senator, Mr Obama had singled out Switzerland's UBS as one of the banks which helped "tax cheats" and he also helped introduce a Senate bill last year to crack down on offshore tax havens.

"The pressure on Switzerland will definitely increase now," Martin Naville, head of the Swiss-German chamber of commerce, was quoted as saying in the Tagesanzeiger daily. He believes that Switzerland should be pro-active in approaching the US to improve the county’s image.

"Anybody who wants to get Switzerland out of the firing line cannot go with empty hands," he said, adding that the US authorities did not understand the Swiss legal distinction between tax fraud and tax evasion. The US seems to lump both into one category of tax fraud with which it then demands assistance.

Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf was recently quoted as saying that he did not think tackling Switzerland would be President Obama's first priority, but Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey believes that pressure is mounting.

Asked how Switzerland would respond after Mr Obama's election in a recent interview with the Tribune de Geneve, she responded: "It is clear that tax issues will come to the fore and that we will have to face them, both from the  European Union and the United States. This is a logical consequence of the financial crisis."

UBS, already reeling as Europe's bank worst hit bank by the sub-prime melt-down is already under pressure due to investigations into its dealings with US clients. It was recently alleged that some 250 US customers of UBS had been given 30 days to appeal against Switzerland handing over banking details to the US authorities.

The Swiss tradition of strict client confidentiality goes back centuries and Switzerland is not alone in upholding such a principal. Bank secrecy was written into law in the early 1930s to aid banks in resisting Nazi German pressure to provide details of the assets of fleeing Jews. Since then, however, it has become associated with tax evasion which is not a criminal offence in Switzerland.

Switzerland is the world's biggest offshore centre with about $2 trillion or about 27 per cent of estimated global offshore assets, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

In an interview with Friday’s Bilanz, Sal Oppenheims’ Matthias Graf von Krockow was reported as saying: "The economic pressure on Switzerland will be enormous if the EU and the United States pursue this together. You can't build a business model based solely on banking secrecy."

In the final analysis, President Obama will have bigger issues to worry about than he did when he was a senator, but the pressure on Switzerland could increase all the same.