New Delhi, Sep 29 (IANS) India is renegotiating tax treaties with 75 countries to broaden the scope of exchange of information, especially banking information, that would help tighten control over black money, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said Thursday.
‘As a measure to tighten the control over black money, the government has made significant progress in the recent years,’ Mukherjee said at an anti-corruption conference here.
‘A process of re-negotiation of Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements with 75 countries to broaden the scope of the article concerning exchange of information to specifically allow for exchange of banking information has been taken up,’ the finance minister said, adding that the negotiations had already been completed with 22 countries.
Mukherjee said India had entered into 16 new ‘Tax Information Exchange Agreements’ mostly with the so-called tax havens like the Bahamas, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, Jersey, Gibraltar and Monaco.
On the tax treaty with Switzerland, the finance minister said the two countries have signed an agreement to amend the existing treaty.
‘As soon as Switzerland completes its internal process, the treaty shall come into force and will allow India to obtain banking information from Switzerland in specific cases for the period starting from April 1, 2011,’ he said.
Addressing the valedictory session of the seventh regional conference on anti-corruption initiatives of the Asian Development Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development here, Mukherjee said a multifaceted approach was required to address the issue of corruption in India.
‘Corruption is widespread and deep-routed in our society. There are issues of slackness in implementation of existing laws, ineffectiveness of some laws, lack of coordination between different agencies that have overlapping mandates, policy gaps such as in the area of election funding and governance failure in several areas of public services delivery, that have contributed to the pervasiveness of this phenomenon,’ he said.
