Germany has again bought a stolen disk with data on German individuals with accounts in Switzerland suspected of tax evasion.

This time the disk was bought by federal German authorities together with the state of Lower Saxony.

Through this legally questionable move, the country acquired a disk containing 20,000 data sets, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance told WealthBriefing.

Prior to this purchase, the German state of Baden-Württemberg rejected to buy this data due to questions of the legality of this move. According to the website of Neue Züricher Zeitung, the Swiss daily, the German authorities paid €185,000 (about $221,900) for this deal.

This acquisition follows a similar move made by authorities in Düsseldorf, the capital of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which purchased stolen data with the names of 1,100 German Credit Suisse clients with Swiss accounts earlier this year. NRW was said to have paid €2.5 million for the disk.

The Federal Ministry of Finance was unable to confirm to WealthBriefing whether the data will be shared with other states. Tax fraud investigation is dealt with by state authorities in Germany. However, similar to the North Rhine-Westphalian case, it can be expected that there will be a waiver to alleged tax evaders reporting themselves to the tax authorities.

After the NRW disk acquisition, reports claimed that more than 10,000 individuals reported themselves to the authorities.

It is not clear which bank’s data is to be found on the disk. 

Switzerland has a policy of not offering administrative assistance in cases that came to light due to stolen data.

Earlier this week, this publication reported that German investigators have started to make use of the data acquired by NRW (more here).