Black money adds up to Rs 6400 crore, SIT tells Supreme Court

By NewsGram Staff Writer

The Special Investigating Team (SIT), set up to monitor the probe into black money case, stated in a report on Tuesday that the overall undisclosed taxable income from the unreported HSBC accounts abroad amounts to Rs 6,400 crore. The report was submitted in Supreme Court before a bench headed by Chief Justice H.L. Dattu.

While a tax demand of Rs 4500 crore has been raised, Rs 237 crore has been recovered so far, as per the report of The Indian Express. Reportedly, out of 628 HSBC accounts that are under the scanner, there is sufficient reason to take legal action against 403 accounts, said SIT. Recently, the government has been successful in extracting evidences from France regarding 575 HSBC account holders.

As per the newspaper, in the executive summary of the report, SIT stated, "Further information has been received in 575 cases in the first week of February 2015. Some of the cases which were hitherto not actionable may become actionable after such investigation."

The summary was also given to Ram Jethmalani, the petitioner advocate, and he suggested that every poll candidate should file an affidavit stating that he or she does not hold any illegal money abroad, and if anything is found otherwise, then that person should be expelled from electoral politics.

Targeting finance minister Arun Jaitley, Jethmalani said, "President Pranab Mukherjee, in his stint as finance minister, had informed Parliament that India has identified over 40 tax havens abroad which are the places where Indians stashed black money."

"But the present finance minister innocently tells Parliament that India has not identified any tax haven abroad. His understanding is worse than a schoolboy. Every schoolboy in India knows about the existence of tax havens where Indians park their illegal money. This is a circumstantial evidence to show that those in power today are involved in protecting the persons who stash black money abroad," added Jethmalani.