Get India's Stolen Money Back

by CBI on May 21, 2010 08:13 PM Hide replies (v) Failure to pay to the credit of the Central Government the tax deducted at source. [Section 276B] (va) Failure to pay the tax collected at source. [Section 276BB] (vi) Wilful attempt to evade any tax, penalty or interest [Section 276C(1)] (vii) Wilful attempt to evade the payment of any tax, penalty or interest levied under Income Tax Act. [Section 276C(2)] (viii) Wilful failure to furnish in due time return of income. [Section 276CC)] (viiia) Failure to furnish return of income in Search Cases as required under section 158BC [Section 276CCC] (ix) Wilful failure to produce accounts and documents as directed by issue of notice under section 142(1) [Section 276D] (x) Wilful failure to get the accounts audited as directed by the Assessing Officer under section 142(2A). [Section 276D] (xi) Making of a statement in verification or delivery of an account or statement which is false and which the concerned person knows or believes to...

Switzerland on Thursday said it would share data of black money allegedly stashed away by Indians in Swiss banks in accordance with the tax treaty between the two countries. "The release of data shall be in accordance to the provisions of the double taxation (avoidance) treaty between the two countries," Switzerland [ Images ] Ambassador Philippe Welti told reporters on a query about Swiss government's stance on providing information about money from India [ Images ] stashed in Swiss banks. Both countries have completed talks on revising the existing double tax avoidance agreement to seek information on black money. Welti said, "The dialogue on revision has been in very specific direction that is to add tax frauds case as a qualification for request and also tax evasion cases to qualify for the release of data." "Some other countries have also made similar requests, and negotiations have taken place, say two or three rounds so far and they have found ag...

4 May 2010, 0554 hrs IST,J Raipura, Skeletons are supposedly tumbling as the income-tax authorities and investigative journalists with unnamed sources are probing the Indian Premier League. First, the easy targets. Match-fixing , for starters. Nobody seems to be asking who are involved. And where is any evidence to conclude the allegation to be prima facie worth investigating? Nobody is suggesting that Indian cricket is all clean. But it's easy to make wild allegations and claim immunity from having to prove anything as ‘just about everybody knows' . Move to ‘betting' . It is rumoured that thousands of crores are wagered on every single IPL match and that it is a transnational industry . What is, per se, wrong with betting other than the fact that it has not been legalised to collect some taxes? Betting on horses is legal. We have had single-digit lotteries conducted by state governments. Casinos are a rage world over. Instead of acknowledging our desire to gamble and p...

By Ralf Isermann (AFP) – May 5, 2010 AUGSBURG, Germany — A German court on Wednesday sentenced a Canadian-German arms dealer, a key player in a party funding scandal that helped propel Chancellor Angela Merkel to power, to eight years in prison. Karlheinz Schreiber, 76, who holds dual Canadian and German citizenship, was found guilty of withholding some 7.5 million euros (9.7 million dollars) in taxes between 1988 and 1993 by a court in the southern city of Augsburg. The verdict brought to an end the second high-profile case against Schreiber, whose dealings with former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney resulted in the latter being forced to explain himself at a public inquiry. Sentencing Schreiber, presiding judge Rudolf Weigell said he wanted to disprove the prejudice that in such cases, "you fry the small fish and let the big fish go free." Schreiber "bribes anything and anyone when things are not going well and then defrauds the state anyway he can," W...

The Guardian (Nigeria), May 7, 2010 SIR: Several years ago, the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) reported that about $107 billion of Nigerian money was held in private accounts and assets in the United States and Europe. More recently, the Global Financial Integrity (GFI) think tank showed that Nigeria lost $89.5 billion in illegal outflows to developed nations, between 1970 - 2008. The other week, Nigerian newspapers published the names of 80 prominent Nigerians who were alleged to have partaken in the Halliburton N27 billion NLNG bribe. Included in this list, are four former heads of state, to former first ladies, a former vice president and 74 other prominent compatriots from every region of Nigeria. These reports beg the questions: Is the arrest and prosecution suspected of corruption the only tool capable of checking and ameliorating the plague of corruption in the past 50 years? Is it realistic to believe that any Nigerian government in the near future...

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff May 15, 2010 WASHINGTON — An informal money-exchange network known as “hawala’’ — a centuries-old system that operates outside conventional banking networks — is at the center of the investigation into three Pakistanis arrested Thursday in Massachusetts and Maine with alleged ties to the suspect in the failed Times Square bomb plot, law enforcement officials said yesterday. The men, who were detained on immigration charges after several raids across the Northeast, were described by government officials as having funneled money to Pakistani-born Faisal Shahzad, who is in federal custody for trying to set off a car bomb earlier this month. The three men are being investigated for possibly using the hawala system to provide money that Shahzad used to finance the plot, the officials said yesterday. But finding out where any such funds originated could prove exceedingly difficult, according to government officials and specialists in terrorist financing, who s...

WRITER 22:22 HRS IST New Delhi, May 18 (PTI) Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today made it clear that his ministry has been investigating into two aspects of whether there was tax evasion and money laundering in the IPL and it has nothing to do with other issues concerning the Twenty20 event. "So far IPL is concerned we are looking into two angles. One is about tax evasion or avoidance angle and the other is whether there was money laundering aspect. Except these two areas there is no other angle which the Finance ministry or the Income Tax department is looking into," Mukherjee said. "If there was tax evasion and avoidance the Income Tax officials will look into it. These are the statutory responsibilities of the tax officials. They have been vested with this power and authority by the Act of Parliament and they don't need any approval or concurrence from anybody," he told NDTV.

 Noida scam: ED notices to four IAS officers Pervez Iqbal Siddiqui, TNN, May 11, 2010, 04.47am IST LUCKNOW: The enforcement directorate (ED) has registered a case of money-laundering and issued notices to three serving and one retired IAS officers of Uttar Pradesh cadre whose names have figured in the Rs 4,721 crore Noida land scam that took place during 2006-2007. The list also has the names of 11 other senior officials including 3 PCS officers. The action came after the ED took suo motu cognisance of inputs on money-laundering in connection with the Noida land scam that took place during Mulayam Singh Yadav's last regime as chief minister of UP and was detected shortly after Mayawati took over in May, 2007. The serving officers, who have been issued notices are Rakesh Bahadur, Sanjeev Saran and Ravindra K Nair (assistant CEO). Devdutt, who also served as Noida CEO, retired the year the scam was detected. Apart from the four IAS, officers from the Provincial Civil Servi...

ervez Iqbal Siddiqui, TNN, May 11, 2010, 04.47am IST LUCKNOW: The enforcement directorate (ED) has registered a case of money-laundering and issued notices to three serving and one retired IAS officers of Uttar Pradesh cadre whose names have figured in the Rs 4,721 crore Noida land scam that took place during 2006-2007. The list also has the names of 11 other senior officials including 3 PCS officers. The action came after the ED took suo motu cognisance of inputs on money-laundering in connection with the Noida land scam that took place during Mulayam Singh Yadav's last regime as chief minister of UP and was detected shortly after Mayawati took over in May, 2007. The serving officers, who have been issued notices are Rakesh Bahadur, Sanjeev Saran and Ravindra K Nair (assistant CEO). Devdutt, who also served as Noida CEO, retired the year the scam was detected. Apart from the four IAS, officers from the Provincial Civil Service (PCS) including CP Singh (who was the th...

•Posted: Thu, Dec 3 2009. 9:42 PM IST   ; search routine, says firmThe Enforcement Directorate searched 10-12 offices of Emaar MGF in Delhi and NCR in connection with alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Management ActShabana Hussain New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday searched the offices and homes of several board members of Delhi-based real estate developer Emaar MGF Land Ltd in connection with alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (Fema). “Around 10-12 offices of Emaar MGF in Delhi and the National Capital Region have been raided,” said an official in the ED, who did not want to be named. “A minimum of Rs10-15 crore of cash was seized from two-three offices.” Emaar MGF, currently preparing for an initial public offering, said the searches were routine. “There was a routine search operation by Enforcement Directorate at some of our premises in Delhi today. We have fully cooperated with the investigation,” a spokesperson said ...

  Well Done Abba is a very recent short movie which depicts the reach of corruption in Governance in a realistic manner. Incidentally, the movie also shows one of the ways in which it has become possible to deal with the malaise. The information revealed by invoking the provisions of the RTI Act, 2005, as shown in the movie, enables a village community to seek successful redressal of their grievance. The guilty go unpunished, however. Instead, they are rewarded! A number of wells dug under a scheme of subsidy are found, in the movie, to be physically non-existent but the certificates of completion verifying the fact of availability of water in each well are available. The Govt. of the day, apprehending its fall on account of the ensuing scandal, gets over the problem by having the missing wells dug up, this time properly, by using funds available under a different scheme. And, at the end of the day, those guilty of > corruption, as stated, not only walked free but were pub...

Dear all, From Gulf News of May 2, I gather that the notorious Col. Muammar Gaddafi of Libya has called for the dissolution of the republic of Switzerland. His reason for doing so is simple, and, if one gives honest thought to the all important issue of trillions of dollars stashed abroad in safe heavens of the world, it would be difficult to disagree with him. His contention, with which all of us should agree, is that this country houses, in its banks, immense wealth looted from other countries, and vast sums in the nature of proceeds of fraud and forgery committed by people around the world, and, what is more, the Swiss banking system promotes and encourages assisted suicides of those who hold hidden accounts in their banks. Quoting figures, Gaddafi has gone on to say that as many as 7000 people have been made to commit suicide in this fashion. The untold wealth held in the accounts of all such people stands confiscated and Switzerland becomes its owner! A great idea indeed! While S...

special article 4 May 2010 Government, Opposition And Corruption ;Rajinder Puri THE most damaging weakness of India’s political class is its lack of credibility. Regardless of the truth, people at large are convinced that the entire political class is corrupt. The government covers up corruption cases. The Opposition dares not pursue them even when those in the government are involved. The Scorpene deal, the Koda mining scam, the Raja Spectrum scam, the IPL scam ~ the list of unresolved cases that do, or will, gather dust seems endless. The highest leadership in both the government and the Opposition lacks public credibility. This is because of the curious inertia displayed by these leaders even after circumstances cloud their reputations. The biggest scam currently on the radar is of course the Hassan Ali Khan hawala scam. Readers will recall this scribe had earlier drawn attention to the Hassan Ali scam and the government’s brazen cover-up to bury the truth. Hassan Ali is the owne...

Ravindra Kumar-The Statesman-7th.May 2010 To believe in something and not to live it, is dishonest ~ Mahatma Gandhi. IT must be galling for the Prime Minister to realise that, contrary to popular belief, it was two women ~ neither of them holding a Constitutional post ~ who decided policy in his Government until the other day. And if Dr Manmohan Singh subscribes to Gandhian values of integrity, it must be even more galling to realise that by the Mahatma’s lights, he may actually be a dishonest man. When Gandhi said that “non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good”, he had sounded a note of caution for everyone in public life. As the head of a Congress-led government, Dr Singh is bound more by the Gandhian edict than others. And as a man who wears integrity on his sleeve the Prime Minister must by now be aware that he heads a government whose members ~ some of them at least ~ wallow in sleaze, subordinate national interest to commercial interests, and obt...

The government has approved an amendment to a deal with the United States over cases of suspected tax evasion by clients of the UBS bank. The provisional application of the revised UBS protocol permits Switzerland to provide legal assistance in cases not only of tax fraud, but also of continued and serious tax evasion, the Federal Justice Office said on Wednesday. In January, a ruling by the Swiss Federal Administrative Court threatened to torpedo the US-Swiss agreement reached last August. The court found shortcomings in the deal which the amendment now addresses. The revised UBS protocol ensures that Switzerland is able to fulfill its obligations under international law, the statement said. As part of the accord with Washington, Switzerland agreed to process and hand over within 12 months data of up to 4,450 UBS clients suspected of tax dodging. Because the court blocked the implementation of the original agreement, the Swiss Federal Tax Administration can only take decisions on...

Monday, April 26, 2010 22:15 IST The Indian Premier League (IPL) did not start with Sunanda Pushkar. It has been around for more than three years. The relationship between IPL franchises and tax havens is not something new. But the investigative hounds were unleashed after the exit of minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor.  Initial findings by the finance ministry’s department of revenue — which has the income tax wing and the enforcement directorate under it — suggests that many IPL franchises had routed their money through tax havens. The World Sports Group (WSG) has reportedly told officials that Multi Screen Media (MSM) did pay $80 million as “facilitation fees” for the IPL’s telecast rights. The money was apparently transferred to the Virgin Islands. The structure of the Jaipur franchise is intriguing. JIPL is a 100% owned subsidiary of EM Sporting Holdings Ltd, Mauritius, which has made investments in JIPL. The Mauritius holding company is again a joint ventu...

GENEVA — The Swiss government says a draft law that would allow aid agencies in Haiti to receive at least $4.6 million claimed by the family of Haiti's ex-dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier is ready for approval by lawmakers. The government said Wednesday the draft law on the restitution of assets held in Swiss banks for deposed dictators will be put to parliament after winning widespread support. It would make it easier for such assets to be repatriated to national governments. The Swiss government acted after the top Swiss court ruled Jan. 12, right before Haiti's devastating earthquake, that the $4.6 million must be returned to Duvalier's family because the statute of limitations on any Duvalier clan crimes would have expired in 2001.