ABSTRACT
In 2009 a member of an opposition party who is a leading constitutional and criminal lawyer, a former head of police, a scholar, and three others petitioned the Indian Supreme Court to direct the central government to bring back about Rs.70 trillion black (unaccounted for) money stashed away by Indian nationals in tax havens. Subsequently, one of the Wikileaks revelations listed individuals, many of them Indians, who had black money in Swiss banks. In January 2011 the court chided the Indian government for treating black money as simply a treaty issue related to double taxation: ‘We are talking about mind-boggling crime. We are not on the niceties of treaties’. 2
