Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal speaks at a press conference in New Delhi yesterday. He accused the government of being “selective” in revealing the names of foreign bank account holders “because it knew the list contained the names of those who are close to the Bharatiya Janata Party.” Others in the picture are AAP leaders Ashutosh, Sanjay Singh, Prashant Bhushan and Manish Sisodia.


Agencies/New Delhi

The government yesterday revealed the names of three businessmen accused of illegally stashing funds in foreign bank accounts as it seeks to recover billions of untaxed dollars parked abroad.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, which took power in May, had accused the previous Congress government of failing to get tough on the issue that has become a political lightning rod.
The government filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court yesterday naming three people, including Pradip Burman, a former director of the Dabur food group, for allegedly hiding money abroad.
The government has been under pressure to identify offenders following petitions from activists including BJP leader and prominent lawyer Subramanian Swamy, who has waged an aggressive campaign to prosecute wealthy people with undeclared funds offshore.
The government said in its affidavit it was “committed to disclose the names of persons holding illegal money... following due process of law.”
BJP spokesman Sambit Patra called disclosure of the names an “historic day.”
“Names are gradually being declared. Today is the beginning of the end for those who illegally stashed money abroad,” Patra told reporters.
But opposition Congress Party leader Digvijaya Singh accused the BJP of “selective revelation” of names and said the drip-feed process smacked of “blackmail, not black money.”
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley last week said Congress could face “some embarrassment” when names of people holding illicit foreign accounts was made public.
Swamy said he did not understand why the government had not disclosed the identities of all alleged offenders.
“I do not see any legal issues in releasing all 700 names,” he told CNN-IBN television network.
“The government will disclose names against whom we have prosecutable evidence,” Jaitley told reporters yesterday, referring to other cases still under investigation.
In 2011 French authorities informed India of around 700 Indians with Swiss accounts. The information came from a data leak by a bank employee. Other funds are believed stashed in tax havens such as Lichtenstein.
Soon after taking office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi set up a team of regulators and ex-judges to repatriate illicit funds.
The three names had been revealed because “prosecution has been launched under the income tax law,” the government said.
Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based group that tracks money transfers, said Indians surreptitiously shifted $344bn overseas between 2002 and 2011, depriving India of vital tax revenues.
But that money abroad is a fraction of illicit funds concealed in India, experts say.
The Dabur group said in a statement that Burman opened his “legally allowed” foreign account while he was a non-resident Indian.
Another person named in yesterday’s affidavit, Pankaj Chimanlal Lodhiya, chairman of jewellery-and-real estate firm Shreeji Trading in Gujarat, told reporters he had complied with tax laws and had no foreign account.
The third person named, Goan mine operator Radha Timbola, said in televised remarks that “we want to see the affidavit” before commenting.
Aam Aadmi Party leader and prominent legal activist Prashant Bhushan said he was “disappointed at the (disclosure of) relatively innocuous names rather than the more influential and powerful names.”
The government in its affidavit said it had no intention to hold back any information or the names it has received from foreign governments of Indian citizens holding undeclared accounts in foreign banks containing income on which no taxes were paid to the national exchequer.
“The intention of the present government is clear and unambiguous. The government is keen to unearth the black money held abroad and for that purpose it will use all diplomatic and legal means and also all investigative agencies to obtain information that can assist in such unearthing,” the affidavit said.
At the same time, the government also sought to make it clear that every foreign account held by an Indian overseas may not be illegal, even as all names cannot be disclosed till such time it has evidence of wrongdoing.
The government had told the Supreme Court earlier that it cannot yet reveal the names of all Indians with alleged illegal bank accounts abroad, based on the information it had received from foreign governments.
This, it had said, was mainly on account of the fact that it cannot afford to break the various treaties with foreign countries on double taxation, and that prosecution proceedings, with proper evidence in hand, had to be initiated first.






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