•The G-20 meeting was not the proper forum for taking up the issue.

This customarily self-serving rationalisation was put out by one of the Congress party’s lawyers and spokesmen. At this very time the party was trying to insinuate that, actually, the PM had taken up the matter at the G-20 summit. As its spokesmen could not point to any statement he made either at the summit or the subsequent press meet, they drew solace from a passing reference he had made at Gordon Brown’s dinner.

In any case, if the G-20 summit was not the right forum for taking up this matter, how is it that in the communiqué that the G-20 leaders issued on April 2, 2009, in paragraph 15, entitled, “Strengthening the Financial System,” they pledged”to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens. We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published a list of countries assessed by the Global Forum against the international standard for exchange of tax information”? Were they also, in the view of the Congress party, acting inappropriately when they made such a strong commitment in their communiqué at the summit?

And recall that no sooner had they issued the threat of imposing sanctions that countries which had been blacklisted by the OECD that very day began declaring that they would indeed sign up on the agreement to exchange tax information, and that includes evasion.

... contd.