IANS/New Delhi
The Congress yesterday asked the government to reveal all the names and not some selectively from the list of those who have stashed away black money abroad.
“The government said it will reveal 136 names out of a list of 800. Why is the government being selective... in revealing the names,” Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi said.
The opposition party also slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government for “threatening” it over the list.
“Threatening Congress over black money will not help. The people want the black money to be brought back, have they got even Rs500 back?”
Another party spokesman Ajay Maken said the Congress “will not succumb to blackmailing.”
“We want to know the entire list. Do not blackmail and threaten us. The Congress Party is not going to succumb to any blackmailing,” Maken said.
He said the people of the country do not just want to know the names. “They are waiting to know how the money will come back to India.”
“Congress Party is above individuals. Stricter possible action should be taken against whoever is involved in it but that should not be inspired by vindictiveness and it should also not be half truth,” Maken said.
Maken was responding to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s remarks that the disclosure of names of those holding illicit foreign accounts will embarrass the opposition party.
“I can assure you there is no embarrassment I (BJP) will have when all the names are disclosed. There is some embarrassment the Congress Party will have because of those names,” he told NDTV news channel on Tuesday.
However, analysts say the Bharatiya Janata Party government is continuing the previous administration’s ‘disingenuity’ on offshore black money.
Over three years ago, the Supreme Court had described as “disingenuous” the then Congress government’s argument that the “confidentiality” clause in the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) between India and Germany came in the way of disclosing the names.
Jaitley repeated the line on October 17 that the “confidentiality” clause in the DTAA signed by the Congress-led government in 1995 came in the way of making public the names of account holders revealed by the German authorities.
The minister said that the government would make public the names of account holders after charge-sheets were filed after investigation by the tax authorities - a Congress stand that the BJP had repeatedly mocked both within and outside parliament.
The party had declared in 2011, through then spokesman and present Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar, that it would declare all black money stashed abroad in tax havens as “national assets” and enact a law to deal with the situation.
Former Lok Sabha secretary general Subhash Kashyap, who, along with noted lawyer Ram Jethmalani, had sought court intervention to retrieve the illegal money, were not shy of expressing their disillusionment with the government’s stand.
“Why are they citing the confidentiality clause now? Were they not aware of it when they were promising during electioneering that they would bring back the money stashed away in tax havens in such and such time,” Kashyap asked.
If the government feels impeded by the DTAA’s confidentiality provision, it can always ask those it suspects of holding such accounts to file an affidavit stating if they or their immediate relatives had accounts in a foreign bank before they travel abroad, Kashyap said.
If their declaration turns out to be false, then their properties in the country would stand confiscated and they should be prosecuted. This was one way by which, without breaching the DTAA’s confidentiality clause, the government can on its own get the information and put it in the public domain, he added.
