Black money: 121 cases filed against HSBC's Geneva account holders

The Income Tax department has filed 121 cases of prosecution against those entities whose names have appeared in the HSBC Geneva bank list, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Friday.

"If I understand correctly, the assessment of 100 of those cases has been completed and 121 prosecutions have been filed by the tax department against those who were caught with the accounts abroad," he said here, addressing the foundation day of the Enforcement Directorate.

A senior official told IANS here in this regard that a report in the matter has also been sent to the Special Investigation Team (SIT), which is now compiling all the figures and data to present an action report before the Supreme Court on or before May 12.

The 121 cases were filed before the March 31 deadline after which these cases would have become time-barred and thus could not be prosecuted by the department.

Jaitley, who said he would move the Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets (Imposition of New Tax) Bill, 2015, in Lok Sabha next week, recently said the government had completed an assessment of 350 foreign accounts and tax evasion proceedings had been initiated against 60 account holders.

This move followed the Supreme Court last year giving a list of 628 entities in the HSBC Geneva branch, that was furnished to it in a sealed envelope by the central government, to the SIT constituted in May last year.

India has no official estimate of illegal money stashed away overseas, but the unofficial assessments put it somewhere in between $466 billion and $1.4 trillion.