260 powerful Sri Lankans have secret Swiss accounts
The Inland Revenue Department (IRD) is to ask a group of locally-based Sri Lankans with secret Swiss bank accounts to make a fresh assets’ declaration after a new complaint was filed seeking action on their undeclared foreign accounts.
A senior IRD official said tracing black or unaccounted money overseas owned by Sri Lankans is not within their jurisdiction but noted that they will ask these account holders to make a fresh declaration of their assets, locally and abroad, based on this new information.Last week a group of state officials filed a complaint with the IRD and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) saying around 260 Sri Lankans were holding numbered bank accounts (secret bank accounts) and urging an investigation, a member of the group, which prefers to remain anonymous for the moment, told the Business Times.
In a July 1, 2012 story, The Sunday Times exclusively reported that investments by Sri Lankan individuals, companies or the Sri Lankan government in secret Swiss accounts totalled more than 85 million Swiss francs (CHF) in 2011 while liabilities listed against Sri Lanka were 44 million in the same year quoting official data from the Swiss National Bank (SNB). At that time the Central Bank declined to comment on whether they were checking or not this information. The official from the complainant group said that some of these accounts belong to bigwigs of the previous regime. One prominent businessman known as a deal maker and commission agent holding many Swiss accounts including one in HSBC Switzerland, is the husband of a lady politician closely connected to a VVIP of the previous regime.
Also in the list are many prominent businessmen and a few well-known captains of industry, he said.
This new list is unconnected to a current Government probe on the alleged foreign assets and liabilities of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, members of his family and cronies of the past regime, where assistance has been sought by international agencies to track down this money.
Permission from the Switzerland government is likely to be sought by the relevant authorities to check this black money flows which the group believes partly came from money swindled from development projects.