A five-member team of Enforcement Directorate and CBI officials, on a data mining expedition to Mauritius, met with success when local authorities expressed willingness to share details of banking transactions of some of the telecom companies linked to the 2G spectrum scam.

Investigators are in Mauritius to probe some of the shell companies that had routed money to beneficiaries of 2G spectrum licences. Cooperation of banks and other financial institutions in Mauritius was important to unearth the money trail and the source of funds.

Ambassador of Mauritius had informed the government here that his country was willing to share banking transaction details. On Tuesday, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, while addressing director generals of Income Tax, said
Mukherjee said in the revised DTAA, a special clause has been inserted to facilitate sharing of information regarding banking sector. "These revised DTAAs will help the Income Tax department tackle black money stashed outside and tax will be imposed on them," he added.

The FM said sharing of banking data in the DTAAs was introduced after the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and subsequent meeting of the finance ministers of member countries that agreed to revise the DTAAs.

Round-tripping is widely reported from Mauritius which is also the source of almost 40% of foreign direct investments into India. A chunk of these FDIs are suspected to be black money that went out of the country without accounting for tax and were rerouted as investments.

India started renegotiating its tax treaty with Mauritius after several instances came to light where some corporate houses had avoided paying capital gains on sale of securities as DTAA provided that they can only be taxed in Mauritius. The latter, however, exempts all income on capital gains.