Frank Lowy, the billionaire shopping centre tycoon, will be revealed today as a client of the notorious Liechtenstein bank, LGT in a US Senate tax evasion investigation that accuses Australia's second richest man of hiding millions of dollars from authorities.

Lowy, the biggest individual shareholder in the quoted property firm Westfield is one of eight wealthy individuals named in the powerful Senate probe for tax evasion which is estimated to cost the US a total of $100bn each year.

The billionaire strongly refutes the allegations of tax evasion but, in a 110-page report to be released at a Senate investigations committee hearing, he and his three sons are accused of using LGT to hide $68m (£34m) from tax authorities between 1996 and 2001, using a complicated structure of trusts and accounts spanning Delaware in the US, the British Virgin Isles and Liechtenstein.

A team of Senate investigators has accessed dozens of sensitive bank documents and memos which reveal that Lowy's account was one of the largest at LGT. Lowy was considered so valuable a client that unusually he was not required to visit Switzerland to sign off instructions. Instead LGT officials flew out to meet him in London.

Lowy founded Westfield 50 years ago. It is now the world's largest retail property firm. He has become a powerful presence in the US and UK over the past few years. The Czech-born former Australian Reserve Bank board member is building a shopping centre in Stratford , east London, which forms a major part of the Olympic Park. He recently successfully persuaded the government to contribute tens of millions of pounds to the project to ensure the mall will be open in time for the games in 2012.

Westfield will also shortly open the White City shopping centre – the first major mall development in London for years.

LGT, the biggest bank in Liechtenstein, is owned by the royal family there. Last February, it emerged that details of thousands of wealthy account holders was passed onto international tax investigators by disgruntled former bank employee, Heinrich Kieber. Kieber, who is in hiding, will be supplying evidence at the hearing via a video link.

The report sheds a searchlight into the secretive world of private banking where trillions of dollars are held by wealthy individuals to avoid and seemingly escape taxes worth an estimated $260bn worldwide per year.

"It is simply unacceptable that some individuals are using offshore tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions to shelter trillions of dollars from taxation, forcing working families to shoulder the tax burden," said Republican senator Norm Coleman who with senator Carl Levin leads the investigation committee. "By exploiting gaping loopholes, these foreign banks are enabling felony tax evasion. Simply put, foreign banks should not be Al Capone safe-houses for evading taxes."

But Lowy totally rejects the assertion made by a team of Senate investigators that he knowingly evaded taxes. In a strongly worded statement, he said: 'The report from the US sub-committee relies on certain documents originally stolen from a Liechtenstein Bank. It draws inferences from the documents and states them as facts - without verifying their contents or inquiring into the real facts. Under the Australian tax system the use of Liechtenstein structures to hold assets is not illegal or improper.

"Before publishing the report the US sub-committee failed to give Frank Lowy or his family any meaningful opportunity to be heard or otherwise have the true position stated. This amounts to a denial of natural justice."

Lowy added that the beneficiary of his Liechtenstein-held funds were charities in Israel.

Other individuals revealed as Liechtenstein bank account holders include Harvey Greenfield, a major US businessman who has donated to senior Democrat and Republican politicians and Michael Miskin, a British born businessman, who is alleged to have used LGT to hide a substantial slice of his fortune from his wife after they divorced.

The Senate report has also accessed sensitive material from UBS, at the centre of a separate tax evasion scandal. This information appears to show how the Swiss bank aggressively marketed tax products which enabled US citizens to evade up to $18bn in taxes according to the US investigators. UBS is helping the Internal Revenue Service with its inquiries.

Today's hearing entitled Tax Haven Banks and US Tax Compliance is focusing on the workings of the offshore industry, examining how "tax haven banks facilitate tax evasion by US clients, hide client and bank misconduct behind the cloak of bank secrecy laws, and add to the offshore abuses that cost US taxpayers an estimated $100bn each year".