India To Soon Own List Of Accounts with Black Money In Swiss Banks

It has come to notice that, India’s long running fight against the black money has gone step up, as Switzerland has come up with a list of all the suspected Indians, who have their accounts in Swiss banks, to store their income, that is not taxed. They will soon share the list with the Indian government.

As one of the officials from the Swiss government confirmed, these names came into notice when Swiss authorities ran the process of identifying the real owners of the all the Switzerland bank account holders. As per the official, these Indians have stashed their income in the Swiss accounts on the pretext of domiciliary organizations, trusts and different legal bodies that have been set up in different countries other than the home country.

The names of the Indians, their account funds and their entities have not been disclosed as of now, due to a clause of confidentiality under the treaty of bilateral information exchange, between the two countries.

The Swiss government is willing to provide their support to the Special Investigation Team (STI) set up by the new government of India, for inquiry on black money.

The official from the Swiss authority has said that the latest data from the Swiss national Bank show foreign client have a total of $1.6 trillion at all 283 banks of the country. Thus, dismissing the claim of the Indians having trillions of dollars stocked up on these banks.

When the question was raised about increasing exposure of Indians to their banks at Swiss Francs – 2.03 billion or INR 14,000 crores, the answer was that these are members who have declared their wealth and identified themselves as Indians, thus there are unlikely chances of this being illegal.

However, the official summed up by saying that the investigation and information sharing is being done actively now, which is different from all the rumored or stolen information, that has reached Indians in the past, like the infamous ‘HSBC-list’.