BJP leader Subramanian Swamy has asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to seek affidavits from all his Ministers declaring that they do not operate, either on their own behalf or through their immediate family members, any undisclosed or illegal foreign bank accounts.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, Dr. Swamy has also sought the scrapping of the Participatory Notes Scheme, as recommended by the Tarapore Committee of the Reserve Bank. “All monies held by Indian citizens under the Participatory Notes Scheme should be declared as black money by the Ordinance [based on a private member’s Bill introduced by former Rajya Sabha member Fali Nariman],” Dr. Swamy wrote.
He said it was an error on the part of the Government to cite the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) in the Supreme Court as an obstacle to disclosing names of Indians having illegal foreign bank accounts. According to Dr. Swamy, the DTAA applies only to accounts of those earning abroad as residents but avoiding paying taxes. “The DTAA only applies when there is an income tax issue.” The lists that the governments of France and Germany had supplied to the Indian authorities were of Indians with accounts in HSBC and LGT respectively, Dr. Swamy noted. These lists, according to Dr. Swamy, were obtained by the governments of these two countries in the process of procuring the details of the illegal accounts of their own civil servants from some employees of the two banks by bribing them.
