‘PM misleading country on issue of black money’

SHIMLA, January 21 (TNN): BJP national vice-president Shanta Kumar on Friday accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Cabinet colleagues of misleading the country on the issue of black money stashed in secret bank accounts in Switzerland and other tax havens and avoiding the issue of its recovery under some political pressure. In a statement issued here on Friday he said that the UPA government was deliberately avoiding the issue despite the fact that the Swiss government wants to return the illicit money and had even conveyed it to India. “India is deliberately avoiding the issue by not fulfilling the necessary conditions and completing codal formalities required to acquire the money”, he alleged.
He said that when he went as a member of the Indian Parliamentary delegation to participate in the UN General Assembly in October last year, Swiss representative Mithias Bachman had told him that the Swiss government was committed to return the money as it considers this amount to be “stolen money”, besides it had signed and ratified the UN Convention against corruption.
Asserting that the Swiss representative had also clarified that his government had started returning the illicit amount to the originating countries, Shanta Kumar, who is also a Rajya Sabha member, claimed that Bachman had made it clear that the return of illicit money stashed in Switzerland depended solely upon the political will of the concerned country.