Union Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh Wednesday emphasised on multilateral action rather than bilateral coordination for streamlining of the judicial processes and timely disposal of cases against fugitive economic offenders, during the inaugural G20 anti-corruption working group meeting in Gurgaon.
“There have been numerous instances of financial or banking frauds that were investigated under relevant statutory provisions that involved high net worth individuals where the proceeds of crime involved were more than $ 1 billion. Offenders fled the country before or after detection of offence… even after initiating the process of getting information from foreign countries on assets through letters rogatory, the process of extradition was found to be highly complex and time consuming, leading to delay in investigation and trial of offences,” he said in his speech.
On a question on the efforts of the government in the extradition of such fugitives, Singh said that the spirit of the meeting group was motivated towards this direction. “…Before this government came [to power] in 2014, there was no serious effort in this direction… It is only now that they [fugitive economic offenders] are being gradually brought to book. But, the procedures are tedious,” he said.
“…nine years have passed, not a single member in the [Modi] ministry has been accused of any serious corruption, scam or scandal…which was a norm in earlier governments.”
In the deliberations among the delegates at the G20 meeting, he said the focus will be to build a consensus on some broad principles, including sharing of information for recovery of assets, strengthening of asset-recovery mechanisms and strengthening law enforcement cooperation in order to force the offenders to return to their home country.
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“Corruption is a global challenge. It affects almost every country and so the fight, the strategies and collaboration also need to be global,” he said. Underlining the Centre’s decisive action under its “zero tolerance crusade” against corruption, Jitendra Singh said the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has transferred assets worth over $180 billion to public sector banks out of estimated losses of $272 billion on account of frauds by fugitive economic offenders.
© The Indian Express (P) Ltd
