A post is becoming massively viral on social media platform. Users are claiming that WikiLeaks has released a list of Indians holding black money in Swiss banks. The names of Rahul Gandhi, Ahmed Patel, Jayalalithaa, Rajiv Gandhi and Ashok Gehlot etc. are in this list.
However, this claim is not new. Users made such a claim in the past as well.
FactCheck
On our analysis, we found that even the official website of Wikileaks https://wikileaks.org/. gave no such information.
In this regard, our team has only received a statement from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, published in The Economic Times in 2011. In which he said in an interview that “Yes, there are Indian names in the list.” Furthermore, Assange revealed that a third party offered a swap deal to hand over the details of Swiss banks and a list of their secret account holders. He said WikiLeaks had an offer that if it returned the data, whistleblower Judith Elmer would be freed.
Apart from this, we found a tweet from the official Twitter account of WikiLeaks. This tweet is of 2011. In which Wikileaks clearly stated that it never published the list of Indians who have deposited black money in Swiss banks.
We would like to inform our readers that the Government of India receives the list of accounts from the Government of Switzerland under the Automatic Exchange of Information Pact (EOI). In this regard, the EoI was signed between the two countries in November 2016.
Consequently, India received its first list of Swiss bank account details of its citizens in September 2019. The second list was sent in September 2020 and the third in October 2021.
Conclusion
Therefore, the claim of releasing a list of Indians holding black money in Swiss banks in the name of WikiLeaks and the names of Rahul Gandhi, Ahmed Patel, Jayalalithaa, Rajiv Gandhi and Ashok Gehlot etc. in this list is false and fake.
