"I'd like to tell you a short story about what happened to me," said Rudolf Elmer, the a former executive at Swiss bank Julius Baer, who has just hit headlines after he revealed he would hand website WikiLeaks information on 2,000 offshore bank accounts that he claims will highlight tax evasion at the highest levels.

"I was in the Cayman Islands and I found a mouse tail. I started to pull on it and it became a dragon tail. I went back to Switzerland and pulled some more and it became a fire-breathing dragon with several heads. One was the bank, another was the Swiss press and another the banking association, and they were all after me and my family."