Odishatv Bureau
New Delhi: Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday said the government had received information from France about Rs 400 crore unaccounted money in as many as 69 overseas accounts of Indians and had recovered Rs 30 crore in taxes from them. Briefing economic editors, the FM said with the help of Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) with France, India was able to extract some information regarding Indians having bank accounts.

He said the government`s efforts on black money were paying results. So far, specific requests in 333 cases were made by authorities for obtaining information from foreign jurisdictions. Both the Income Tax department and Financial Intelligence Unit are pursuing these cases.

"Over 9,900 pieces of information regarding suspicious transactions by Indian citizens from several countries have been obtained which are now under different stages of processing and investigation," he added. Besides, more than 30,700 suspicious domestic transactions are under investigation by different agencies.

The Income Tax department has detected mispricing of Rs 34,000 crore in the last two years, preventing the outflow of this amount to foreign jurisdictions. In addition, I-T investigation wings detected concealed income of Rs 18,750 crore during this period. In the first five months of the current financial year, concealed income of Rs 3,014 crore was detected as a result of searches.

The finance minister said India was engaged with Mauritius to update the existing Double Taxation Avoidance Convention (DTAC) in line with international practices that would help in curbing treaty shopping by corporates here. The government`s recent initiative with Switzerland to obtain information on tax evaders was likely to improve the inflow of banking information substantially, the FM said.

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