Financial Transparency Coalition

NEW DELHI: Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee said in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday that the government, as promised before the general elections, was working on getting back black money stashed away abroad.

New Delhi (PTI) India is negotiating with Switzerland and other countries to revise the secrecy clause in bilateral treaties like double taxation avoidance agreements to get information on matters like black money.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday said that New Delhi has initiated a dialogue with Swiss authorities to obtain information on Indian black money stashed away in banks there — an issue that had raised much political heat during the elections with BJP leader L K Advani making it a major poll plank.

A week after the new government took oath, a senior official of a large Wall Street bank, which survived the meltdown, made a call to a few bankers in India. She had a specific question: were local markets expecting money to flow back from Swiss banks and tax havens? It could well have been an academic question by a treasury economist preparing an internal note. Indeed, bringing back money parked by rich Indians in secret offshore bank accounts was a promise in the BJP manifesto that few voters chose to buy. The issue, arcane to many, was supposed to...