Switzerland Denies Preparing List of Suspected India Tax Evaders
June 23 (Bloomberg) — Switzerland said it has no list of suspected Indian tax evaders and doesn’t plan to prepare one, after India’s Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said he’d ask the European nation for details on bank accounts held by Indians.
The e-mailed comments from Switzerland’s State Secretariat for International Financial Matters today followed a Press Trust of India report yesterday, citing an unidentified Swiss government official, that the nation is preparing a list of Indians suspected to have deposited so-called black money through legal entities based in countries other than India. India defines black money as assets that haven’t been reported to authorities at the time of their generation or disclosed at any point during their possession.
Jaitley’s Bharatiya Janata Party said in a 2011 report that Indians had $250 billion, or 13 percent of gross domestic product, hiding in Switzerland. India’s tax-to-GDP ratio was 10.7 percent in 2012, compared with Brazil’s 15.4 percent and Russia’s 15 percent, World Bank data show.
“The ministry of finance has officially not received any communication as yet,” Jaitley had told reporters earlier today in New Delhi, referring to the PTI report. “We are today writing ourselves to the Swiss authorities with whom the ministry has been in touch so that details with regard to whatever information the authorities have can be expedited.”
In March, weeks before the former Congress party-led government lost Indian elections, then-finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said Switzerland rebuffed repeated requests for information on the bank accounts of Indian residents. Within 24 hours of taking office on May 26, Prime Minister Narendra Modi created an investigative team of former judges and current regulators to find the concealed assets.
It’s legal for Indian residents to hold money in foreign bank accounts as long as they disclose it and pay taxes. A large portion of black money is converted into gold and held in households domestically.
To contact the reporters on this story: Siddhartha Singh in New Delhi at ssingh283@bloomberg.net; Jeffrey Vögeli in Zurich at jvogeli@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Ten Kate at dtenkate@bloomberg.net Jeanette Rodrigues, Dick Schumacher
