A Swiss court yesterday sentenced a 54-year-old computer specialist to three years in jail for selling client data from Swiss bank Julius Baer to the German tax authorities, after the man agreed a plea deal with prosecutors.

Switzerland has come under growing international pressure to change its banking secrecy laws, which other governments say enables many of their wealthy citizens to avoid taxes. German-born Lutz Otte, appeared before the Swiss criminal court and said that he had intended to use the bulk of a €1.1 million reward to pay off taxes he owed in Germany.

“The pressure from the finance authorities was pretty great. I saw an opportunity to alleviate the pressure on myself,” Otte, who moved to Switzerland from Germany in 2005, said in court.

He said he left it to a German accomplice to pay the back taxes in Germany, but had no knowledge of whether the middleman had done so. Judges ruled that Otte can serve half his three-year sentence, for breaching Swiss banking laws, industrial espionage and money laundering, on probation.

He had confessed to collecting data on wealthy German and Dutch clients from computer applications at Zurich-based Julius Baer between October and December 2011, as agreed with the German middleman.