Finance Minister Eugene Cox last night expressed surprise at reports that anti-globalisation hackers obtained personal details on thousands of government and business leaders who attended the Davos economic summit in recent years.

Mr. Cox has attended the World Economic Forum Summit in the Swiss resort for the past two years. Premier Jennifer Smith attended last year and leading Bermudian businessmen are regular visitors.

Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung reported yesterday that protestors gained data including the numbers of credit cards, passports and personal cellular phone numbers of figures like former US president Bill Clinton, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, and South African President Thabo Mbeki.

The newspaper said the hackers obtained information about 27,000 other leading politicians, chief executives of major corporations, and top managers who have taken part in the forum, and that they showed a CD-ROM containing 80,000 pages of data to the paper's reporters.

Mr. Cox told The Royal Gazette last night: "I am not aware of this.

"Credit card numbers and things like that everyone has to be careful about and one would not want personal information to get into indiscriminate hands.

"But I think the conference has a high degree of security so I am very surprised to hear this.'' Mr. Cox said he was not aware of supplying passport or credit card details to Davos organisers.

He would have had to be screened for security before but thought his passport details would only be needed to get into Switzerland, and his credit card number would only be known to someone if he made a purchase at the conference.

Davos security breach `surprises' Cox "This year was different from last year because we had a number of things done by a network system that was run on the congress site,'' he added.

"One could use the computer to assign preferences for lectures or papers.

With that kind of information it might be possible for people to get information, but I am not aware of anything like that taking place.'' Alois Hafner, spokesman for the Graubuenden state police that oversees Davos, said the details of what had happened were still unclear.

"Whether it was hackers or something else has yet to be determined,''he told The Associated Press.

Charles McLean, a spokesman for the Geneva-based foundation that organises the annual meeting, said world and business leaders would be advised of the security breach today via e-mail, the newspaper reported.

"We take this incident very seriously and are bringing in outside experts to clear up what happened as soon as possible,'' McLean said.

The newspaper said credit card companies around the world began to block the affected accounts Saturday evening.

It said the list included 1,400 credit card numbers with the name of the card holder, the expiration date and in some cases the same details on the spouse's card.