```The latin term, which means "with-without", is jargon for a kind of trade that enables banks to conceal the identities of their clients.
This, in turn, helps the clients to claim false, double, or multiple tax rebates on capital gains tax paid on the anonymous trades.
The fraud cost German taxpayers €31.8bn between 2001 and 2016, the investigation estimated. It cost France €17bn, Italy €4.5bn, and Denmark €1.7bn. It also harmed Austria, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, and Spain.
News of the problem first came to light in Germany in 2016.
But its full scale was exposed by a cross-border investigation, involving 19 media in 12 countries, which consulted more than 180,000 pages of documents, including letters from German prosecutors, and which published its findings on Thursday (18 October).```
