The governments of Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland announced Friday that they will relax their rules on banking secrecy and would cooperate with the foreign governments trying to prosecute tax evaders.

The Swiss government said in a statement that would "accept the standards of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on administrative assistance on tax matters."

The Swiss government said in the statement that it would only respond to "concrete and justified" requests, and that that it would still protect the country's banking customers from "unjustified watching from abroad".

Earlier in the day, Austria's finance minister Josef Proll had told reporters that the banks in Austria would begin to share more information on a case by case basis if there was "justified suspicion" of tax fraud.

The government of Luxembourg also came out with a similar statement on Friday, saying that information about the country's banking customers would be shared only after "explicit proof" was provided.

The three governments were under tremendous international pressure to relax their banking secrecy rules to help other nations combat tax evasion. Their decision to ease banking secrecy laws was prompted by an OECD threat to submit a list of "uncooperative" countries at the G20 summit meeting scheduled for April 2 in London.

If included in the OECD list, the three countries risked being added to a global blacklist of uncooperative tax havens, which would have resulted in their banking clients paying additional withholding taxes and being subjected to more strict auditing and reporting requirements.

Earlier, the governments of Andorra and Liechtenstein had also announced their decision to loosen banking secrecy laws after coming under intense international pressure to do so.

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