Why is it that whichever way the government officials seek to book these criminals, identified or unidentified, is riddled with such ridiculous technical flaws in their approaches that they can’t stand the test of even domestic judicial scrutiny leave alone making the foreign governments and international agencies see the Indian point? Who is preventing the investigating officers in mega money laundering cases from doing their job dutifully? Why the investigating officers are not made answerable to the government for their failure to nab those law offenders and face penalty for sloppy probes? Why did they let go Syed Mohammed Hassan Ali Khan, popularly known as Hassan Ali, off the hook after the Pune-based punter and stud farm owner was charged with huge tax evasion, money laundering, arms smuggling, mafia connection and multiple passport carrying? Where is Hassan Ali at this moment?

In 2006, the income-tax department of the government of India had slapped on Hassan Ali a tax claim of whopping Rs. 36,000 crore (approx. US$8 billion). Ali was alleged to have failed to report an income of about Rs. 1,60,000 crore (US$23 billion), which was believed to have been stashed abroad through illegal money transfers, till that period. Assuming that the I-T department did its homework well before making these ‘revelations’ to the public, Ali could easily take the credit of being the world’s second biggest tax evader and money launderer after former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky of Yukos Oil who is currently serving a long jail term for embezzling oil income worth US$27 billion and transferring the amount in foreign bank accounts. The all-time big personal tax evader in the United States, Walter Anderson, a telecom and space tycoon, would look like a pigmy before giant Indian money looter Hassan Ali. Anderson confessed before a US court to concealment of income of only $365 million. In 2007, Anderson agreed to turn over $200 million to the US taxmen in restitution. As a result, his jail term was reduced to nine years from the original 80 years.

It may sound bizarre, but Hassan Ali too had surrendered before Mumbai’s Bhoiwada Court in December 2008 but could not be prosecuted for want a proper charge sheet from law enforcers. He secured bail within days. The authorities never charged Ali with tax evasion and money laundering and produced no proof to prove these accusations against him. Instead, Ali was charged with the possession of four passports issued by regional passport offices at Mumbai, Patna and Hyderabad and also from London. The Bombay High Court later pulled up the state government while dismissing the latter’s appeal for cancellation of bail to Ali as the court observed that the government was not truly keen on pursuing the case as the accused was not even served a notice over six months after the state went into the appeal. Hassan Ali’s surrender to the court turned out to be a big farcical act in the annals of the country’s criminal trials. No official from any of the concerned departments was pulled up or questioned for such inexplicable lapses and mysterious sloppiness in the Hassan Ali case.

Hassan Ali was alleged to have maintained a cash balance of $8 billion in the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Zurich, as on December 22, 2006. He was allegedly linked with several international money transfer deals, including the one with well-known Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and Kolkata businessman Kashinath Tapuriah, brother-in-law of late M P Birla. Hassan Ali is also said to be close to ‘wanted’ India-born gangster Dawood Ibrahim. A bio-data as strong as this of a criminal failed to impress the government of India’s such strong law enforcement agencies for financial crime as the Enforcement Directorate, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the Central Board of Direct Taxes to file a concrete case against Ali till date. The question one may ask in the first place that how on earth the income-tax department slapped a Rs. 36,000-crore tax evasion charge on Hassan Ali without a single legally admissible document in its hand? If it had, why didn’t it become pro-active to prosecute Ali when he surrendered before the Bhoiwada Court?

Thanks to a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by eminent criminal lawyer Ram Jethmalani and his associates before the Supreme Court in 2009 seeking the apex court’s intervention to make the government of India bring back Hassan Ali’s billions to the country, Ali is in the news again. But, the Enforcement Directorate’s response to the Supreme Court’s notice in this case is hardly encouraging. Jethmalani and Bofors kickback crusader S Gurumurthy had also cited Swiss newspaper Schweizer Illustrierte report on allegedly hidden Gandhi family assets of Swiss Franc 2.5 billion in Switzerland. They referred to excerpts from the book – The State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia - Past, Present, and Future — by Yevgenia Albats, an acclaimed investigative journalist, that alleges Russian kickback to some of the Ghandhi family members, demanding investigation and action by the government. In case these allegations are totally baseless and mischievous, the least the government could do under the circumstances is to take legal action against the publishers and the authors for the malicious campaign. The government’s silence so far on these presumably international smear campaigns against the country’s such famous citizens as the Gandhis and Parliament members is rather inexplicable.

It would appear that the government has practically resigned on the corruption issues, especially those involving high net-worth individuals (HNIs) with strong political links. Why blame Swiss Banks when the government itself takes shelter under confidentiality clauses in international treaties to protect the names of prominent Indian money launderers? Ironically, their crimes are even officially understated as merely the cases of ‘tax evasion’. The government’s sloppy attitude on dealing with big-time financial embezzlement cases makes it clear that nothing may emerge out of the ongoing public noise against high-level, high-value corruption as long as the offenders stay strongly linked with the political power. No investigative agency is going to touch them. Union Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal’s open challenge thrown at findings of the Office of the Comptroller of Auditor General of India in the alleged multi-billion dollar 2G spectrum allocation case should serve as a reminder to the bosses of the so-called powerful government watchdogs on financial wrong doings investigating into hi-profile corruption cases.

It seems Syed Mohammed Hassan Alis of India may not face any serious threat from partisan state-controlled investigating agencies for many years to come. Not even the Supreme Court is able to touch them. The apex court’s frustration in dealing with an unwilling government in naming the Indian black-money hoarders using Liechtenstein banks even after an official level disclosure by the German authorities is amply clear when its division bench observed: “It is a pure and simple theft of national money. We are talking about mind-boggling crime. We are not on the niceties of various treaties.” The judges said that such unaccounted money parked in foreign banks was nothing but the plunder of the nation with serious security ramifications. But, the government paid no heed to these remarks. It did not budge from its position. In another case concerning the appointment of a tainted former bureaucrat as the country’s chief vigilance commissioner, the government had even questioned the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to challenge the official decision.

The chances are these criminals like many others, whose names did not appear in the German government list, will remain free individuals and will continue to prosper in the business of accumulating illegal wealth and pumping it out of the country through dubious means. The possibilities are that some of these super-rich law offenders may even become future law makers by occupying seats in Parliament. In fact, quite a few of them may be already there as MPs in both the houses exchanging pleasantries with the likes of the prime minister, the Lok Sabha speaker or the opposition leader in Rajya Sabha whenever Parliament is in session. Does the current whereabouts of mysterious billionaire Syed Mohammed Hassan Ali really matter to anyone in the government? (IPA Service)