NEW DELHI: The Narendra Modi government on Friday endorsed the Congress-led UPA's position that double taxation avoidance treaties with other countries barred it from revealing names of all Indians having accounts in foreign banks. The statement led senior advocate Ram Jethmalani to accuse finance minister Arun Jaitley and attorney general Mukul Rohatgi of diluting the government's stand on black money.
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Jethmalani, who is the petitioner in the case, was provoked by an application moved by Rohatgi seeking modification of the apex court's earlier order directing that names of account holders in foreign banks be revealed.
In the application, the government said that while it was ready to disclose to Jethmalani the names of account holders who were to face prosecution for stashing illegal money abroad, it would not share with him the identity of those who had legitimate accounts in foreign banks.
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This angered Jethmalani, who has persisted for five years to finally convince the apex court to set up a specialized team for recovery of black money deposited by Indians in foreign banks.
"The government has made an application which should have been filed by the criminals. I am amazed. I have written a letter to the Prime Minister and have asked him to treat this as my dying declaration," said the veteran lawyer who is a suspended BJP member of Rajya Sabha.
The vehement reaction led a bench of Chief Justice H L Dattu and Justices Madan B Lokur and A K Sikri to request Jethmalani to cool down while they turned down his plea to dismiss the Centre's application. The bench said it had to hear both sides.
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Outside the court room, Jethmalani was vitriolic in his criticism of Jaitley and the AG for drafting such an application and said it flew in the face of the BJP, which had all along supported his efforts to bring back black money and opposed the devious stand taken by the UPA government.
"Now, they are adopting the stand which was a result of a fraud played on the country by the Manmohan Singh government," Jethmalani told reporters.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley
Jaitley rejected the charge that Modi government was reluctant to disclose the names of those having illicit foreign accounts. "Is the present NDA government led by Modi in any way reluctant to make some names public? Certainly not. We have no difficulty in making names public. But they can be made public only in accordance with due process of law. And the due process of law has been constrained by the DTAA (Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement) which was entered into between India and Germany when the Congress party was in power on June 19, 1995," he told reporters.
The finance minister said while he would not comment on the merits of the DTAA the Congress government signed with Germany in 1995, the fact was that adherence to it formed "part of the due process of law".
Rohatgi also dismissed Jethmalani's charge as "unwarranted and unfortunate", saying the application reflected the constraints government faces because of its obligations under a bilateral treaty. He said while the Centre had no objection to making public the names of those holding accounts in foreign banks who were facing prosecution for stashing illegal wealth abroad, it was opposed to clubbing those having illicit accounts foreign accounts with those having legitimate ones. "Mere opening of an account abroad legitimately is not a crime," he said.
Rohatgi said the government had in good faith and in compliance with the Supreme Court's directive revealed the names of all Indian account holders in Liechtenstein Bank to Jethmalani on the condition that he would not disclose them to others. However, he went on to put all the names in the public domain, provoking serious objections from the German government. Allowing more such things could be a spoiler for similar double taxation avoidance treaties the government plans to ink with many foreign countries, including a crucial one with the US in December, the AG said.
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He said if the German government's objections, which were valid on the basis of the DTAA signed by the previous government, was not respected, then other countries would not reveal the source of black money from India stashed in their banks.
"The end result is that our fight against black money will get defeated if foreign governments refuse to share information about Indian account holders in banks of their countries," Rohatgi said.
