The nation was informed by Shri Arun Jaitley, Hon’ble Finance Minister of India, on October 1, 2016 that at the end of the first quarter of the Income Declaration Scheme, 64,275 declarants have collectively disclosed Rs 65, 250 crore, boasting that the government had taken serious steps to unearth black money at “domestic and foreign level.”
Really Mr Jaitley? After recovering a mere Rs 1 crore per person, are you again trying to fool the nation, just as your predecessor did, that you and your government have put in their best efforts in retrieving the country’s black money stashed away abroad. The real black money holders of our country must be laughing all the way to the bank.
Do you, Mr Jaitley recall the black money figure estimated by your own Party at US$ 1500 billion amounting to Rs 90 lakh crores, which they swore to the nation they would retrieve once in power?Where does your ‘recovered’ money of Rs 65,000 crores touch that figure? Do you think the people of this country can be fooled by your great achievement of whitening Rs 65,000 crores? You have already become a figure of ridicule among the people who know the truth, and of the general fraud and deception once again being played on our people. Every petty realtor in this country, a breed multiplying alarmingly, as our country urbanizes, can shell out much more of unaccounted money than the Rs 1 crore per head at any given time. The Finance Minister has committed the greatest betrayal of the Indian people by abetting his predecessor, and following his own duplicitous fraud on the people of India, with yet another ‘jumla’.
Besides, there appears to be a blanket ban regarding the modalities of recovery of black money from the 65,000 people, the nature of the enquiry, the procedures, and to what extent the veracity of disclosures was checked. A disturbing news item appeared in the highly respected Economic Times on October 1, 2016, with the headline that ‘Roadside eatery owners declare Rs 50 crore under the black money scheme in Mumbai.’ The humble eateries consisted of vada pav centres, dosa centres, sandwich centres and also a jalebiwala in south Mumbai, and had reportedly been raided by the Income Tax authorities, and coerced to pay under IDS. Come on Mr Jaitley, don’t test our sense of humour to this absurd extent. Surely, these roadside vendors do not constitute the highest league of black money holders in our country that need priority attention! And can there be a more revealing instance of benami, conspiratorial transactions, for which you are stated to be the biggest beneficiary. Your entire exercise smacks of yet another jumla to deceive the people of India, and requires an immediate investigation.
The world knows my painstaking efforts to inform the nation about the plunder of India and the illegal flight of unaccounted money into foreign banks under the UPA regime. I have appeared as a petitioner before the Supreme Court seeking stringent government action to check this flight of capital and constitution of a Special Investigation Team to monitor the repatriation of black money back to India.
Our Hon’ble Finance Minister has been an active agent the entire black money operation that was unfolding in our country over the last decade. He was Leader of the Opposition, when the UPA Government was stubbornly refusing to avail of the German Government’s offer to share the names of the Indian black money account holders at the LGT Bank, Leichtenstein Bank that it had obtained.
I will repeat a few questions to Mr Jaitley from my detailed list of questions posted on my blog on 15TH April, 2016, which will remind my readers of his diabolic role in the fraud –
Why did you not as Leader of the Opposition, insist upon the disclosure of this information in national interest? Instead, you appear to have joined hands with your predecessor Chidambaram, in his case that the German Government never gave us any names.
Are you aware that when the SIT ordered that copies of the Government’s correspondence with the German Government be made available to me, I was given 17 letters, but with blacked out names of the writers and receivers of the correspondence?
Have you seen that in one of the e mails, your predecessor and his accomplices made one slip and forgot to blacken the e mail address of one Ms Anita Kapoor, a favourite of the previous regime, who not surprisingly was rewarded by becoming Chairman CBDT by you, and has been getting some assignment or other after retirement?
The originals of these 17 letters remained in the Finance Ministry, now under your charge. If you were an honest Finance Minister, you would have exposed the truth that this fraudulent correspondence was not between the Government of India and the Government of Germany in connection with Germany’s offer to give us the names of the illegal account holders, but between the CBDT and the Central Tax Office in Germany about the Double Taxation Treaty.
I accuse you of being in conspiracy with the previous dispensation, and cheating on your own Prime Minister. It is your actions of conspiracy with the former regime that led your Party President to make his famous ‘election gumla’ remark. I am taking this matter to the Supreme Court and will ask for a public confession from your President as to the circumstances which led him to do so.
There is enough public talk that this whole Income Disclosure Scheme is nothing but another innovative money sharing scheme. And judging from the pittance of Rs 65,000 crores that has been ‘recovered’, this public talk might well be true.
I suggest that it is still not too late for Modi and the nation to get rid of you, the presiding fraud of the Finance Ministry.
