Corruption in India

Black money in Swiss banks - Swiss Banking Association report, 2006 Nationals of Top Five countries holding Bank Deposits in Switzerland: India------ $1,456 billion (6,000,000 Crores of Rs)Russia-----$ 470 billion UK---------$ 390 billion Ukraine----$ 100 billionChina------$ 96 billion Is India poor? Ask Swiss banks.With personal account deposits in Swiss Banks of $1,500 billion 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? Corrupt Indians have deposited in foreign banks this vast sum of money - all misappropriated by them from the people of India and the Government of the day does not bother to do anything about it! If this huge amount of black money and property is repatriated to India, the entire foreign debt can be repaid in 24 hours. Then, after paying the entire foreign debt, we will have a surplus almost 12 times larger than the evaporated 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, the Government will be able to maintain the country very comfortably. Why is it that the Government is not moving in this direction. The answer is very simple: Those who are to take decisions are themselves culpable of holding deposits in Swiss Banks! How can the thieves convert themselves into policemen? Some 80,000 Indians travel to Switzerland every year, of whom 25,000 travel very frequently. Obviously, these people would not be tourists. They must be travelling there for some other reason - believes an official involved in tracking illegal money and money laundering. These details show how these thieving INDIANS have sucked out this country's wealth to a foreign country This is not merely confined to Swiss Banks alone; there are Banks in other countries involved too. Now for some simple arithmetic - India with $1456 billion or$1.5 trillion has more money in Swiss banks than the rest of the world combined - surely qualifying for a significant entry into the Guinness Book of Records for maximum Public loot of the national exchequer. No one is asking questions, not even the so-called Communists who are more interested in defence and nuclear deals and not the welfare of the aam-admi. No wonder, everyone in India loots with impunity and without any fear of retribution. After all, this is probably the only democratic country in the world which has not jailed a corrupt politician or bureaucrat so far. In China, they are marched up to the firing squad and done away with. Probably we can try solving this problem with firing squads. What is even more depressing in that this ill-gotten wealth has been stashed away in 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 law-abiding Indians may not be exactly aware of how such secret accounts operate and what are the rules and regulations that help transfer of monies to 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 and a substantial percentage of this is from India. Naturally, the secrecy associated with the bank accounts in such places is central to the issue, not their low tax rates as the term 'tax havens' suggests. One should recall that despite all the money wasted on inquiring into Bofors, the ultimate beneficiary of those transactions could not be identified because of the secrecy associated with these bank accounts? Please forward this message to all your friends and let us demand that the Government of India should move towards the recovery of the national loot stashed away abroad as soon as possible which would definitely bring down the inflation in our economy and stabilise prices to the benefit of the common man. Talk to various political parties who have done nothing in this regard and get them to put pressure on the Government of the day. IMPORTANT This appeal has for its origin a Retired Member of the Board of Direct Taxes of the Government of India!--