Vladimir Lenin, Charlie Chaplin and Marc Rich found refuge in Switzerland. So did Roman Polanski, or so he thought up until he was arrested in Zurich on charges of having sex with a minor.

Switzerland’s reputation as a haven will never be the same. That is a good thing if political refugees like Chaplin, who fled McCarthyism in the 1950s, still get due consideration. (Maybe Lenin should have been sent back to Russia.)

There used to be a certain security associated with Switzerland. Polanski was just one of many who evidently felt safe there: He was even paying taxes on the $1.5 million mountain chalet he bought in Gstaad in 2006, one year after a new international arrest warrant had been put out for him.

Similarly, until last year, thousands of US citizens and UBS AG clients were reassured that the Internal Revenue Service would never get a peek at their Swiss bank accounts.

Those days are over. Switzerland can no longer hide behind its cherished neutrality or its attachment to financial privacy, two concepts now under attack by the outside world.

It was the international financial crisis that put the squeeze on tax havens: Switzerland, which accounts for 27 percent of the world’s privately held offshore wealth, was clearly the most vulnerable.

The Alpine nation’s political purity was also damaged in recent months after its president said the country was “willing to apologise” to Libya for the “inappropriate” arrest last year of Col Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son, Hannibal, on charges of beating up servants in a Geneva hotel.

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