Finance Minister Ishaq Dar yesterday ruled out the possibility of the recovery of billions of dollars stashed in Swiss banks any time soon.
The minister said this in reply to a journalist’s question that whether a memorandum of understanding on taxation signed with the United Kingdom could lead to availability of information on wealth of Pakistanis in the UK.
He was talking to journalists after signing of the MoU by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) and Revenue and Customs of the UK for exchange of information and cooperation on improvement in taxation and revenue collection.
The FBR Chairman, Tariq Bajwa, and the head of Department for International Development (DFID) in Pakistan, Richard Montgomery, signed the MoU.
He said many countries like the United States, the UK and others had consumed many years to reach agreements with Switzerland for exchange of data on wealth of their citizens in Swiss accounts and even they had not been able to recover any money.
He said the PML-N government had taken an initiative to hold talks with Switzerland for avoidance of double taxation.
The move would help bring into the tax net revenue that is lost to leakages. The process has been started recently and will take a couple of years to complete and hopefully an agreement will be signed during the tenure of current government.
