Berlin - Responding to outrage in Luxembourg over a remark by Germany's treasurer this week, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Thursday it was not something that he would have said.

Peer Steinbrueck, Germany's sharp-tongued finance minister, stirred up a hornet's nest with criticism of three nations which over many years had offered secret bank accounts that were used by Germans who hid funds from the taxman.

"I'll invite Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Ougadougou to a conference about taxes in Berlin," he joked Wednesday in Brussels.

Ougadougou is the capital of Burkino Faso in West Africa, and has not been accused of assisting tax evasion. Many people in Luxembourg said they perceived the remark as both overbearing and insulting.

After a call with his Luxembourg counterpart Jean Asselborn, the German foreign minister was soothing, dissociating himself from Steinmeier's remark. "I've personally been in Ougadougou, and this comparison is not something I would have thought of myself," he said.

However finance minister Steinbrueck was unrepentant.

"We politicians are constantly accused of boring, empty talk," he told a meeting of businessman supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). "But when you talk more colourfully, as I do, someone complains too. Now they are even setting the Burkina Faso ambassador against me."

Both Steinbrueck and Steinmeier are Social Democrats. (dpa)