ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) leader and expected finance minister Asad Umar has said that PTI leadership has decided in principle to constitute a formal task force to finalise recommendations for repatriation of $200 billion owned by Pakistanis stashed in Swiss and other foreign bank accounts.
Asad Umar has said that the task force would be comprised of all the stakeholders after formation of government with the mandate to recommend ways. The task force will have specific Terms of Reference (ToRs) and will finalise its report in the light of ToRs, he added.
He said the former minister for finance Ishaq Dar had given estimates of $200 billion owned by Pakistanis lying abroad on the floor of the House in 2014. Later on, he said the former chairman FBR Tariq Bajwa had also referred to these estimates in one of official summaries. He said that he does not have exact figures on this account but this upcoming task force to be constituted under the PTI regime would scrutinise all the details and would recommend ways and means to repatriate the stashed amount running into billions of dollars.
However, with these rough estimates, the last PML-N-led regime approved an amnesty scheme known as Foreign Asset Declaration Scheme by offering them attractive rates but it failed to ensure whitening of the foreign assets in a big way. There were a total of 82,848 declarants who whitened assets valuing Rs2.5 trillion through domestic and foreign tax amnesty schemes as 5,363 availed themselves of foreign tax amnesty and 77,485 got domestic amnesty. Pakistan has so far received $366 million from abroad as cash on account of the offshore tax amnesty scheme. The FBR sent tax notices to a few thousand who submitted declarations but did not pay the due amount and now they would be bound to pay full 35 percent tax on their assets.
