Pakistan to hold Swiss talks to recover embezzled money

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is to hold talks with Switzerland on a new tax treaty in the hope of retrieving state assets illegally stashed in the European country's secretive banking system. Finance Minister Ishaq Dar told the National Assembly that negotiations on a revised agreement with Switzerland would be held from August 26 to 28. Former president Asif Ali Zardari, who left office last September after five years, was dogged throughout his tenure by corruption allegations involving Swiss banks dating back to the 1990s. He was accused along with his late wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, of using Swiss banks to launder $12 million of illegal kickbacks. Switzerland enacted a new law in 2011 to make it easier for countries to recover assets stolen by politicians and hidden in its banks. In early 2012, Switzerland said it had returned $1.83 billion in illicitly-placed assets to countries involved in the Arab Spring regime changes, but Pakistan's current tax agreement does not allow it to take advantage of the law. In a written reply to the lower house of parliament, Dar said the government was “seriously working to seek help of the new Swiss laws... to exchange heretofore confidential information about ill-gotten monies stashed up in the clandestine Swiss banking industry.” Dar said the Swiss authorities have expressed willingness to renegotiate the current Pak-Swiss agreement. Meanwhile during the question hour in the National Assembly, Parliamentary Secretary for Finance Rana Muhammad Afzal Khan said that the federal cabinet has already approved a summary to renegotiate the existing Pakistan-Switzerland Tax Treaty with the Swiss government in this regard. He said that it will be helpful to identify those Pakistanis who have illegally stashed away their money in foreign bank accounts. Khan also said that the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) is engaged in a campaign to identify those not filing their taxes while notices have been issued to 92,000 potential taxpayers for filing of returns and in response, over 8600 have filed their returns. The Parliamentary Secretary said that the government wants to bring 100,000 potential taxpayers in the tax net during the current financial year while the FBR is making all out efforts to achieve the tax collection target set for the current financial year. Later during the proceeding, MQM MNA Shahida Rehmani said that the government had failed to bring peace in the country. She said that the terrorists are taking time to regroup by involving the government in the dialogue process while the government is unable to give any time frame to bring peace in the country. She also condemned the target killing of lawyer and human rights activist Rashid Rehman who was killed by unknown gunmen on Wednesday in Multan. Commenting on a point of order, Parliamentary Leader of the PTI Shah Mehmood Qureshi suggested that the government should approach the Supreme Court like the PTI did, to investigate the matter of rigging in the general elections 2013. In response, Minister for Railways Khawaja Saad Rafiq said that the PTI should wait on the decisions of the election tribunals while the protest is not a solution of any problem in this regard.