Facing tremendous pressure from the Supreme Court for setting up of a special investigating team to unearth the black money case and make it directly answerable to the top court, the Centre instead created a two-tier “multi-disciplinary” mechanism for better coordination between different agencies of the government to go into various aspects of the unaccounted money stashed in foreign banks by Indians.
Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam placed before the apex court a notification of the finance ministry on creation of the two-tier multi-disciplinary mechanism under which there will be a 10-member committee comprising the heads of all the probe agencies of the Centre, which would be supervised by another four-member panel of the home secretary, foreign secretary, defence secretary and secretary (revenue) in the Cabinet secretariat to ensure better coordination among the investigating agencies.
The 10-member probe panel to be headed by the secretary department of revenue will comprise of deputy governor Reserve Bank of India, director Intelligence Bureau, Enforcement Director, CBI director, chairman Central Board of Direct Taxes, director general revenue intelligence, finance intelligence unit director and joint secretary foreign trade in CBDT.
The SG said the committee though would function in close coordination but where the cases needed to be segregated in respect of handing over a specific case to a particular agency, the same would be done after a detailed deliberation like the criminality of any case would be handled by the CBI, money laundering by Enforcement Directorate, tax evasion by CBDT and coordination with foreign banks like UBS and other Swiss banks by the RBI.