India and Switzerland have signed a joint agreement which engenders automatic exchange of Swiss Bank indian account holders list. The financial information on accounts held by Indians in Switzerland and vice versa will be disclosed yearly.
As a matter of fact, The incumbent government has a major objective to uncover ‘Black money’ . It gave a prolonged opportunity for the defaulters to come clean ,all by themselves . This move didn’t trigger imposition of any major punishments or penalties on those who revealed their unaccounted income. Now the government is thrusting upon the need to curb the menace of ‘Black money’ in the country.
On June 6, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann at Geneva Both shared a dialogue regarding the initiation of negotiations on the Agreement for Automatic Exchange of Information(AEOI) clubbed with the need for expeditious exchange of information for overcoming tax evasion.
On 22/11/2016, India entered into a dual-agreement with Switzerland , thereby entering into the selected list of countries with which Switzerland will share financial information .India has been taking earnest steps to be a part of this framework in order to abstain its citizens from loading unaccounted funds in their Swiss accounts.
India wins confidence of Swiss authorities:
India has been successful in garnering confidence of the Swiss bank authorities. Switzerland confided in India regarding the use of financial information,which shall be restricted to tax purposes only. Moreover , Banking secrecy shall be maintained . Also, confidentiality would prioritized under all circumstances .
The finance ministry in its statement said,”As a result, it will now be possible for India to receive from September, 2019 onwards, the financial information of accounts held by Indian residents in Switzerland for 2018 and subsequent years, on an automatic basis.”
From 2018, both countries will commence to collect information . The first disclosure of swiss bank indian black money list is expected to be from 2019 onwards.Although , the maiden disclosure is dated as late as 2019. Nevertheless, any attempt to tap ‘BlackMoney’ is better late than never .
