Era of banking Secrecy is over?
INAUGURATING the high level two day International Seminar on “Adapting Tax Systems and International Tax Rules to the New Global Environment: A Shared Challenge for India and the OECD”, the Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said,
“The statement of G 20 leaders in London issued in April 2009, gave a call to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens. It stated that we stood ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. It further added that the era of banking secrecy was over. However, the spirit of this statement has not been respected. We cannot say with certainty that the bank secrecy is over in all cases. While the countries have accepted to end bank secrecy in general, some countries have agreed to do so only from prospective date and are not willing to exchange past banking information. This puts a question mark on the efficacy of present legal provisions for exchange of banking information. There is an urgent need to revisit existing legal framework developed by OECD in this regards.”
Though they shout hoarse to bring back black money parked in tax havens, many of the politicians are actually scared that some stupid country will reveal the secret funds parked there.