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From Russia to China, and Britain to Iceland, the revelations of the “Panama Papers” have tarnished officials and the wealthy over the implication that they hide riches offshore. (AFP) [/caption] New Delhi, May 10 : Nearly 2,000 individuals, entities and addresses with links to India figure in the latest edition of ‘Panama Papers’ giving information on offshore holding of companies in tax havens.
A random check of the database for India displays about 22 offshore entities, 1,046 officers or individual links, 42 intermediaries and as many as 828 addresses within the country.
These range from the tony and posh locations of metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai to mofussil locations like that in Haryana’s Sirsa, Bihar’s Muzaffarpur, Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur and state capital Bhopal and those in North Eastern states.
“The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) publishes today a searchable database that strips away the secrecy of nearly 2,14,000 offshore entities created in 21 jurisdictions, from Nevada to Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands. “The data, part of the Panama Papers investigation, is the largest ever release of information about offshore companies and the people behind them. This includes, when available, the names of the real owners of those opaque structures,” the consortium said.
The global body that brought out last month the first edition of the ‘Panama Papers’, by way of secret offshore data sourced from a Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, said the information about a particular country could have “duplicates” as it reiterated that “there are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts.”
“We do not intend to suggest or imply that any persons, companies or other entities included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly,” the body said on its web portal as part of the disclaimer on the release of the offshore “leaks” database.
India, taking note of over 500 entities that surfaced in the first set of names released last month, had created a Multi-Agency Group (MAG) comprising officers from various central investigative agencies like the Income Tax department, FIU, RBI and Foreign Tax and Tax Research (FT and TR) under the Central Board of Direct Taxes apart from the Special Investigation Team (SIT) on black money reviewing probe in these cases.
Names and addresses put up on the website of the body not only shows identities of some individuals and addresses along with description of the companies held but also specifies the date of incorporation of the firms in some cases. The database has around 30,000 documents listed with India links.