For over a week, newspapers have been publishing reports that the Swiss authorities rejected the request to disclose details of the accounts and transactions of Hassan Ali Khan because the Government of India had sent forged papers.
This has now been confirmed by the spokesman of the Ministry of Justice of the Swiss Government in his interview to CNN-IBN.
The Justice Ministry official has also revealed that this fact about the forgery had been communicated to the Indian Government in early 2007 itself. He has said that the Indian Government was requested to provide valid documents and to confirm that the case against Hassan Ali Khan is a criminal one.
The Indian Government sent some documents in March 2007, and even these were not the requisite ones.
Since then, the Indian Government has not got back to the Swiss Government at all on the matter – neither to show that the documents it had supplied were genuine and adequate nor to replace them with genuine documents and ones that are required under the law.
What can this indicate except that what was done was done by design?
Furthermore, it is shocking that the Government has suppressed these facts – what it had ostensibly done, and what the Swiss Government had communicated to it – from the Supreme Court in its affidavit-in-reply to the PIL that has been filed by concerned citizens. As is well known, suppression of facts from the court – and that too from the highest court of the country – is a grave offence on its own. The Government knows this as well, and yet has chosen to suppress them rather than let the Court, and, through it, the people get an opportunity to learn the truth.
That this Government, the Government that has let Ottavio Quattrochi take away the money that had been frozen on orders of the courts; this Government which then used the CBI to let the man off the hook completely; this Government in which corruption has reached levels that were unheard of till now; this Government which has been consistently soft on terror, that this Government should now have stooped so low as to help an operator like Hassan Ali Khan by sending forged documents to a foreign Government is entirely in character.
Based on what they have been told by officials of intelligence agencies as well as of the Enforcement Directorate, the media have reported that Hassan Ali Khan
• Has been known to be connected to Dawood Ibrahim
• Has been known to have been channeling very large amounts from unknown sources into the Indian stock market
• Has had 8 to 9 billion dollars in the UBS and other banks of Switzerland
• Has been responsible for hawala transactions of over Rs. 35,000 crore through Swiss banks.
That such a nefarious operator should be helped by this Government is entirely predictable – it is the Congress(I) Government of Karnataka which refused to permit the CBI to investigate the equally notorious Telgi, and later put obstacle after obstacle in its course.
Apart from the sorts of statements by which it tried to mislead the country when Mr. Advani raised the demand for getting India’s stolen wealth back, the way it has helped Hassan Ali Khan exposes its character, and the fact that as long as such a Government is in office, the country will never get its wealth back.
But what is at stake is not just the wealth that has been stolen from the country. In addition,
• the country’s honour is at stake
• and its security.
Once again, the country is being held up to ridicule – once again, the world is being shown how the Government of India will bend our laws and institutions to help the worst sorts of criminals and their associates, exactly as banana republics do.
Moreover, international bodies as well the National Security Advisor of this very Government have pointed out that black money, hawala operations as well as tax havens are being used by terrorists and agencies like the ISI for carrying out terrorist and anti-India operations.
The Asia Pacific Group, which has been studying money laundering and terrorist operations, pointed out in 2005 that India had not taken the requisite steps in this regard, that it had not even carried out the comprehensive threat assessment that was required.
The Government did nothing.
No less an authority than the National Security Advisor has been stressing publicly since early 2007 that stricter provisions need to be put in place to check money flows to and from tax havens, and to ensure that banking secrecy is brought to an end, as these channels are being used by terrorists and their sponsors.
The Government did nothing – actually, it did something: around exactly the time that the National Security Advisor was urging the foregoing, in February-March 2007, it sent forged documents to foreclose any possibility of facts being discovered about Hassan Ali Khan and his associates.
In June 2008, the Government-appointed Administrative Reforms Commission, headed by its very own, M. Veerappa Moily, drew attention to the urgent need to plug terrorist financing. In its 8th Report, the Commission listed the channels through which, and the guises under which terrorist organizations and their sponsors were sending money for their operations in India. In particular, it urged that the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist operations needed to be merged. It made a series of detailed recommendations in this regard.
The Government did nothing.
That on even so grave a matter the state of affairs is exactly as it was is evident from the fact that in March 2009, the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released by the US State Department again shows that, far from taking effective steps, India has not even brought its legal framework against money laundering and terrorism financing at par with the regime agreed to by the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force. It urges the country to swiftly do so.
We urge the media to continue to pursue the facts.
We urge the people to see how the country’s development, its security, its honour are being jeopardized by this Government.
And how even the obvious steps will just not be taken till this Government remains in office.
