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A day after a global report pegged illicit financial outflows from India between 2003 and 2012 at $439 billion, the government on Wednesday said the amount of domestic black money was no less than that kept abroad.
“The quantum of domestic black money is similar to what is stashed abroad,” Revenue Secretary Shaktikanta Das said at a function organised here by the Confederation of Indian Industry.
While there is no official estimate of unaccounted money that Indians have stashed in other countries, taking a study by Global Financial Integrity, a Washington DC-based research and advisory organisation, as the benchmark, black money in circulation in the Indian economy could be around $439 billion of outflows between 2003 and 2012.
The study had said total illicit financial outflows from India stood at $94.8 billion in 2012 alone, which is five per cent of India's economic size at $1.85 trillion that year.
The study, however, estimated illicit financial outflows from only two sources: a deliberate trade misinvoicing, and leakages in the balance of payments (known as illicit hot money narrow outflows).
The secretary said the government was dealing with the black money issue at administrative and legislative levels.
The government has already appointed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe a list of over 600 people with money in HSBC, Geneva, among other cases. In its second report given to the Supreme Court, the SIT revealed the persons on the HSBC list held Rs 4,479 crore in Swiss banks. It also said 201 of the 628 names on the HSBC list (received from France) were either non-residents or non-traceable, while the cases of the remaining 427 persons were actionable. Das said the government was in a dialogue with countries to renegotiate tax treaties. Earlier, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said the Centre was relooking at some of the treaties that could be hindering repatriation of money stashed abroad by Indians.
The government is negotiating tax treaties with countries such as Mauritius and Cyprus, countries through which investors are understood to be re-routing money to invest in India.
On the other hand, the Swiss government has repeatedly refused to cooperate with India on the HSBC list, which it says is based on data stolen by a French employee.
