Britain, France, Germany and a string of leading world economies have pledged to get tough with international financial centres, adding more to a black list and drawing up punitive measures for uncooperative countries, media reports said.

Stephen Timms, UK Financial Secretary to the Treasury, representing the UK at a summit hosted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris to discuss the issue, said the meeting sent "a very strong signal that time is up for people not paying their taxes".

Offshore financial centres have been under fire in recent years – long pre-dating the current financial crisis – from western governments concerned that they were losing large sums in potential tax revenue. The OECD has repeatedly called for a crackdown on tax havens.

However, some groups such as the Cato Institute, the free market US think tank, argue that such havens act as a restraint on high taxes in mainstream economies and provide a refuge from oppressive regimes, and argue that complaints about havens are an excuse to create an international tax “cartel”.

Mr Timms said the UK would next year repeat an operation conducted in 2006, when it demanded the country's top five banks provide information on their offshore accounts. "We gave people the opportunity to disclose offshore holdings and have so far taken in £400 million-worth of tax that otherwise would have gone unpaid," he said.

This time the exercise will be extended to more banks – such as former building societies – as well as UK subsidiaries of foreign banks. "I'm pretty confident that this will yield at least as much again," Mr Timms said.

Eric Woerth, budget minister of France, which hosted the meeting, said: "We can no longer accept that, at a time when we are committing taxpayer's money massively to bailout plans of the financial system, this (system) continues to offer tax havens."

Switzerland came in for the harshest criticism at the OECD summit, with Germany insisting it should be placed on the OECD's international blacklist of tax havens.

" Switzerland offers conditions that invite the German taxpayer to evade taxes. Therefore, in my view Switzerland belongs on such a list," German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said.

One possible punitive measure would be to take action on the tax-deductibility of expenses for companies that do business with tax havens.

There are currently only three "uncooperative" countries on the OECD black list - Monaco, Andorra and Liechtenstein – compared to 40 in 2000. However, there is consensus that many of those removed have failed to honour their transparency commitments.