INDIAN LEAKS

OUR WEALTH IN SWISS BANK

2011-02-07T00:20:00.000-08:00

This is so shocking…. ….If black money deposits was an Olympics event…. India would have won agold medal hands down. The second best Russia has 4 times lesser deposit. U.S. is not even there in the counting in top five! India has more money in Swiss banks than all the other countries combined!

Recently, due to international pressure, the Swiss government agreed to disclose the names of the account holders only if the respective governments formally asked for it.. Indian government is not asking for the details….. ..no marks for guessing why?

We need to start a movement to pressurise the government to do so! This is perhaps the only way, and a golden opportunity, to expose the high and mighty and weed out corruption!

Please read on……and forward to all the honest Indians to…..like somebody is forwarding to you…….and build a ground-swell of support for action ! Is India poor, who says? Ask the Swiss banks. With personal account deposit bank of $1,500 billion in foreign reserve which have been misappropriated, an amount 13 times larger than the country’s foreign debt, one needs to rethink if India is a poor country?

DISHONEST INDUSTRIALISTS, scandalous politicians and corrupt IAS, IRS, IPS officers have deposited in foreign banks in their illegal personal accounts a sum of about $1500 billion, which have been misappropriated by them. This amount is about 13 times larger than the country’s foreign debt. With this amount 45 crore poor people can get Rs 1,00,000 each.

This huge amount has been appropriated from the people of India by exploiting and betraying them. Once this huge amount of black money and property comes back to India , the entire foreign debt can be repaid in 24 hours. After paying the entire foreign debt, we will have surplus amount, almost 12 times larger than the foreign debt. If this surplus amount is invested in earning interest, the amount of interest will be more than the annual budget of the Central government. So even if all the taxes are abolished, then also the Central government will be able to maintain the country very comfortably.

Some 80,000 people travel to Switzerland every year, of whom 25,000 travel very frequently. ‘Obviously, these people won’t be tourists.. They must be travelling there for some other reason,’ believes an official involved in tracking illegal money.. And, clearly, he isn’t referring to the commerce ministry bureaucrats who’ve been flitting in and out of Geneva ever since the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations went into a tailspin!

Just read the following details and note how these dishonest industrialists, scandalous politicians, corrupt officers, cricketers, film actors, illegal sex trade and protected wildlife operators, to name just a few, sucked this country’s wealth and prosperity. This may be the picture of deposits in Swiss banks only. What about other international banks ?

Black money in Swiss banks — Swiss Banking Association report, 2006 details bank deposits in the territory of Switzerland by nationals of following countries :
TOP FIVE

INDIA $1,456 BILLION
RUSSIA $470 BILLION
U.K. $390 BILLION
UKRAINE $100 BILLION
CHINA $96 BILLION

Now do the math’s – India with $1,456 billion or $1.4 trillion has more money in Swiss banks than rest of the world combined. Public loot since 1947:

Can we bring back our money ? It is one of the biggest loots witnessed by mankind — the loot of the Aam Aadmi (common man) since 1947, by his brethren occupying public office. It has been orchestrated by politicians, bureaucrats and some businessmen.

The list is almost all-encompassing. No wonder, everyone in India loots with impunity and without any fear. What is even more depressing in that this ill-gotten wealth of ours has been stashed away abroad into secret bank accounts located in some of the world’s best known tax havens. And to that extent the Indian economy has been stripped of its wealth. Ordinary Indians may not be exactly aware of how such secret accounts operate and what are the rules and regulations that go on to govern such tax havens. However, one may well be aware of ‘Swiss bank accounts,’ the shorthand for murky dealings, secrecy and of course pilferage from developing countries into rich developed ones.

In fact, some finance experts and economists believe tax havens to be a conspiracy of the western world against the poor countries. By allowing the proliferation of tax havens in the twentieth century, the western world explicitly encourages the movement of scarce capital from the developing countries to the rich. In March 2005, the Tax Justice Network (TJN) published a research finding demonstrating that $11.5 trillion of personal wealth was held offshore by rich individuals across the globe.

The findings estimated that a large proportion of this wealth was managed from some 70 tax havens. Further, augmenting these studies of TJN, Raymond Baker — in his widely celebrated book titled ‘Capitalism’ s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free Market System’ — estimates that at least $5 trillion have been shifted out of poorer countries to the West since the mid-1970.

It is further estimated by experts that one per cent of the world’s population holds more than 57 per cent of total global wealth, routing it invariably through these tax havens.

How much of this is from India is anybody’s guess.

Indian Black Money: The Swindler’s List

2011-02-06T23:52:00.000-08:00

ASHISH KHETAN accesses the black list that has been kept away from Indians for two years

It is almost two years since the German Government had passed on the names and bank account details of eighteen Indians who had stashed their alleged ill-gotten wealth in the LGT bank of Liechtenstein, a well-known tax haven nation, 190 km from Munich, Germany.

Germany had officially handed over the list to the Indian Government on 18 March 2009. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee have since said more than once that this list cannot be disclosed to the Indian people. Opposition parties like the BJP and the Left Front have repeatedly said the names must be disclosed. The BJP has been accusing the government of shielding the names of the tax evaders and not doing enough to bring back the crores of rupees stashed away in tax havens.

Thus, the list has become a subject of tremendous controversy and suspense.

Once these individuals respond, we shall share the full details of who these people are and what they do. We shall also put out their responses. This, then, is the list.

1. Manoj Dhupelia

2. Rupal Dhupelia

3. Mohan Dhupelia

4. Hasmukh Gandhi

5. Chintan Gandhi

6. Dilip Mehta

7. Arun Mehta

8. Arun Kochar

9. Gunwanti Mehta

10. Rajnikant Mehta

11. Prabodh Mehta

12. Ashok Jaipuria

13. Raj Foundation

14. Urvashi Foundation

15. Ambrunova Trust

The three trusts in this list are registered outside India.

The government has been claiming so far that a detailed investigation into all the bank account details provided by Germany is underway and making the names public would violate the agreement between two sovereign countries, India and Germany.

These 18 names are part of the list of 1,400 clients, which were stolen from the databank of LGT Group, the Liechtenstein bank owned by the principality's ruling family, and passed on to German tax authorities in 2008.

The German government had paid as much as €5 million, or $7.4 million, for information on German account holders in Liechtenstein on a disk provided by an informant to the German Federal Intelligence Service, or BND.

After this, Germany and England had launched massive investigations into the suspected tax evasions and have since prosecuted dozens of their citizens on charges of tax evasion and concealment of income.

The German Government alone had initiated action against over 600 of its tax payers.

Besides taking action against its own citizens, the German Government had also shared this information with other countries including India.

But the Indian names figuring in LGT Bank list are only a tip of the iceberg. Experts estimate that Rs 65 lakh crores of ill-gotten wealth earned by Indians is stored in Swiss banks alone.

According to R Vaidyanathan, Professor of Finance at the Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru, the average amount stashed away by Indians in offshore tax havens between 2002 and 2006 was $136.5 billion. “These illegal funds lying in tax havens are not just related to the issue of tax evasion. It is capital flight from India and part of a corrupt nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and corporate companies,” says Vaidyanathan.

Different Indian governments over the past 20 years have done little to bring this money back by making necessary changes in existing Indian taxation and foreign exchange management laws.

Besides, the government has been slow in renegotiating double taxation avoidance treaties with different tax havens and making provisions for clauses under which the governments and banks could be compelled to disclose the account details.

For instance, under the existing Indo-Swiss Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA), information on the Swiss bank deposits of Indian residents could not to be revealed until the Indian Government furnishes evidence of criminality behind these banking transactions.

India enters into DTAAs with other countries to encourage flow of foreign capital and technology, and also to check tax evasion. The purpose of a DTAA is to mitigate the hardship caused by dual taxation on the same source of income. Double taxation on a single source earned by an individual is possible under income tax, as taxation depends not on citizenship, but on residential status.

To date, India has signed comprehensive double taxation avoidance agreements with 77 countries.

“I have asked the revenue department to reopen negotiations for all 77 double tax avoidance agreements with all countries that we have entered into so far, so that we can have real time exchange of information on tax evasion and tax avoidance,” Mukherjee had said at the India Economic Summit in November 2009.

Since the recession hit the economies of developed countries, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been leading a campaign for transparency in the international banking system, and making the tax havens to necessarily exchange information with other countries where tax evasions are involved.

The US in particular has been proactive in using the might of its economy to make different tax havens fall in line, and share the names of US citizens who have deposited money in these tax havens.

For instance, the UBS Bank, a Swiss bank and the world’s largest wealth management company, came under US scrutiny in June 2008 to uncover the identity of US nationals who maintained secret accounts in the bank and were defrauding the American revenue department.

When the US Government threatened to prosecute the USB Bank, the bank paid a fine of $780 million and also agreed to reveal the details of the hidden assets of US nationals within a fixed time frame failing which it would face prosecution.

CORRUPTION IN INDIA

2011-02-06T03:03:00.000-08:00

From small time clerks to the high profile politicians, commissioners, police inspectors, traffic police, stock exchange brokers, military establishments, recruiters, sportsmen, judiciary and most of the government employees, corruption is seen and felt in every transaction from bottom of the chain till the top.

In the recent times the private Indian companies captured the top spot in encouraging corruption when dealing with international clients in order to grab lucrative contracts.

Why are the corrupt susceptible to corruption ?

The low salaries of people made them susceptible, bringing with it more inefficiencies and the easy way of making money with less or no accountability. The crime of corruption is easily forgotten , the law offers easy way back into the mainstream and acceptance by the society. In addition to that it is the lure of luxury, personal status enhancement and the false sense of elitism that makes the corrupt vulnerable to illegal and unethical means of acquiring wealth.

The cultural connection and other reasons.

Indian society still has a cultural setup of having the "man of the house" to work for a living, while the wife usually deals with the household work,and this puts a pressure on the man to make the living more luxurious. The routine jobs are usually for life-long, with the support of a union there is a lesser fear of losing the job and there is the pressure of dealing with rising prices of commodities and sponsoring future education of children. The society ,the social upbringing, the culture and a general greed also plays a critical role in influencing a timid mind. The lack of instincts and to avoid the time consuming bureaucratical setup of the organization, the corruption may be a easy way out for people who bribe to make things happen.

How can we stop corruption ?

Greater solutions may include population control to improve the quality than the quantity, Controlling population will bring up the quality of life and thus lesser competition and effective control of people and government processes. However feasible solutions are to impart moral principles in schools, and introduction of stringent audits, accountability, effective tracking of corrupt individuals through citizen cards or tax id's.

Computerization of processes, privatization of public sectors, eliminating the chain of corruption by not just punishing the first level but also higher levels involved.

Corruption is not limited to atheists, even the most corrupts are highly religious and have close family ties, in other words corruption has no boundaries. Religion and religious congregations can support and promote anti-corruption drives.

Corruption is NOT a luxury tax. Whoever described corruption is a luxury tax probably said it out of frustration, the religion of corruption, the corruption of politics,the dishonest souls and perversion of integrity is unpardonable.

Corruption in the news !

The World Bank has suspended $800 million worth of loans to India's health sector after detecting corruption in procurement. Fair enough: corruption should be checked. Yet, if corruption is really a no-no, the Bank should stop almost all lending to India, so widespread is corruption here. The Bank may have just discovered corruption, but it is no news at all to the public....

Top secrets leaked for MNC jobs in US? : source rediff.com All it took was an offer of plum portfolios in United States multinational companies like Microsoft for two senior staffers of National Security Council Secretariat to leak top secret documents to elusive American ‘diplomat' Rosanna Minchew, a Delhi police probe has revealed.Security agencies are still taking stock of the extent to which classified files have been accessed by the two accused NSCS employees.

India 83rd corrupt Nation In the Global Corruption Index, a survey of 133 nations conducted by Transparency International (an anti-graft watchdog), India stood 83rd in the world, alongside Malawi and Romania. India recorded a score of 2.8 out of 10. Last year, India's score was 2.7 out of 10, but it stood 71st in a list of 102 nations, unlike 133 this time. Finland with a score of 9.7 has been ranked first, making it the least corrupt nation on earth. A score of 10 means a country is seen as being ‘highly clean', and a score of zero means ‘highly corrupt.'Bangladesh had the dubious distinction of being the world's most corrupt nation with a score of 1.3, worse even than Nigeria and Haiti, which had scores of 1.4 and 1.5, respectively to stand 132nd and 133rd. However, Asia as a whole fared badly in the report on corruption, with many nations in the region being counted amongst the worst in the world for graft among public officials and politicians.Myanmar ranked 129th and Indonesia was 122nd.