India has made 232 new requests for obtaining secret financial information under the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) to Switzerland during the 2012-13 financial year.
India’s global requests for obtaining classified tax information, in the face of a number of high-profile tax evasion and scam cases, has also seen a 59% – with a total of 646 requests – as compared to a total of 386 similar letters during the 2011-12 fiscal, local news agency PTI reported.
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The investigators have sent 145 similar legal letters to Mauritius during the 2012-13 financial year.
While a huge investment into the country is routed from Mauritius, a number of high-value and criminal probes against a certain number of individuals in the country are connected to black money stashed in Swiss banks.
Switzerland started allowing access to depositors’ personal banking and other financial information to Indian tax sleuths only since April 2010.
According to the report, among the major countries to which India dispatched its secret tax and finance related queries during 2012-13 fiscal were United Arab Emirates (38), United Kingdom (26), United States of America (61), British Virgin Island (22), Cyprus (16), Denmark (11) and Singapore (19) while a number of other nations too figured on the same list.
"This is the maximum number of legal requests that India has sent to Swiss authorities since the revision of the DTAA in 2010. The subject matter of these DTAAs and TIEAs (Tax Information Exchange Agreements) pertain to many high-profile cases which the financial enforcement agencies are probing at present," a senior official privy to the development told PTI.
