BJP asks Centre to release names of black money account-holders

New Delhi, Apr 26 (ANI): The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reacting to an interview of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to an Indian news channel, on Tuesday asked the Centre to release the names of all those, who have stashed unaccounted money in banks abroad.

BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman said despite having received the names from banks in Liechtenstein, the government has refused to divulge them.

"Related list which have come of 22 odd names, the government selectively gave names to the Supreme Court and refused to divulge the names of rest of them. We want the government to release all the names with specific steps that the government is taking towards getting the black money, which is abroad," Sitharaman told reporters here.

Referring to admission of Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee in January that 3.36 billion dollars were stashed in foreign banks, she asked the government to share the steps it had taken to bring the culprits to book.

"We are asking today how many people holding this 15,000 crore have been taken to the court by the government. What specific actions have you taken to get this undeclared or undisclosed income? Has the government made any claim today to get this money back?" she asked.

Sitharaman also accused the government of using the Double Taxation Avoidance Treaty, as an excuse to hide the names.

"Double Taxation Avoidance Treaty or Double Taxation Avoidance as an issue can't be used to help not to release the list of names. It is only an excuse that the government is using," she said.

In an exclusive interview to TIMES NOW's Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami on the Swiss bank data, Assange made a stunning disclosure that there could be Indian names in the data that WikiLeaks would publish.

In the course of the interview, Assange appealed to Indians to absolutely not lose hope that the names of those with secret Swiss accounts will come out at one point in the future.

Hinting that Wikileaks might work with specialized agencies before releasing the Swiss bank data, he pulled up the Indian government for not being aggressive like Germany in going after the list of Indian account holders.

He said that India should in fact be more aggressive because India seems like it is losing per capita more tax money than Germany. (ANI)