Govt continues to be evasive
The government seems to be carrying on with its “evasive” response on the black money from the Supreme Court to Parliament as a comparative analysis of the Centre’s white paper placed before the Lok Sabha and a series of affidavits and statues reports filed in the top court would indicate. But a notable difference in the white paper and the government responses to the Supreme Court is that its special leave petition against the Bombay HC’s order on bail to Pune businessman Hasan Ali had “acknowledged” the seizure of documents showing transfer of $8,00,04,53,000 by him from India to UBS Bank. The SLP filed by the Enforcement Directorate on behalf of the Union government had detailed phenomenal amounts sent abroad by Hasan Ali in at least 14 transactions between 1982 and 2002.
However, the white paper has merely stated that the deposits of Indians abroad had declined from `23,373 crore in 2006 to `9,295 crore in 2010. The white paper had claimed that these figures had been “confirmed” by the external affairs ministry of Switzerland.
This revelation in the white paper, however, was contrary to Global Financial Integrity estimates that the deposits of the Indians abroad between 1948 and 2008 was $213 billion, which had sharply risen to $462 billion by the end of 2008.
The Supreme Court, which had ordered a probe by an SIT under two former judges into the entire gamut of the black money, in the verdict of July 4, 2011 had said “we must express our serious reservation about the responses of the Union of India. In the first instance, during the earlier phases of the hearing before us, the attempts were clearly ‘evasive and confused’, or originating in the denial mode.”
The government, however, had disagreed on the probe by the SIT under former top court judges and has filed a review petition against the verdict.
Since the black money issue came to the centrestage after the income-tax department had made a huge tax claims against Hasan Ali and his associate Kashinath Tapuria, the top court had said “the volume of tax owed to the country, the volume of the monies, by some accounts $8.04 billion and some other in excess of `70,000 crore, that are said to have been routed through various bank accounts of Khan and Tapuria... it has been acknowledged that none of these individuals have any known and lawful source for such huge quantity of monies.”
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