India's Finance Minister Pranab Mukerjee has proposed the setting up of fast-track courts to deal with the issue of illegal money and tax evaders.
Mr Mukerjee said the government had already brought five bills in the parliament to deal with the problem.
The minister presented a "white paper" on illegal money in the lower house.
It did not name any offenders or give any estimates for illegal money but earlier reports have said $500bn was deposited in overseas tax havens.
Outlining the various proposals to deal with the problem of black money, the minister suggested that anti-corruption ombudsmen be appointed at the central and state levels.
"While these measures will set the tone for an equitable, transparent and a more efficient economy, there is much that we could do, both individually and collectively, to strengthen the moral fibre of our society," Mr Mukerjee said.
In the past, officials have said that illegal funds were often sent to tax havens such as Mauritius, Switzerland, Lichtenstein and the British Virgin Islands among others.
Analysts say this flight of capital has helped widen inequality in India.
According to one estimate, India's underground economy accounts for 50% of the country's gross domestic product.
In recent months, India's Congress party-led government has been on the back foot on the issue of black money and corruption.
The Supreme Court has also chided the government for not doing enough to unearth illicit money.
Facebook's future has more than just money riding on it - The Guardian
It may have taken Nasdaq (possibly borrowing the London mayoral computer systems) a couple of hours to work out how much Facebook shares cost. But it took the market less than 60 minutes to test the will of Facebook's underwriters, pulling the shares down to the opening $38 to see if there was somebody prepared to save Mark Zuckerberg's face. There was, of course – how else does one earn one's 7% fee? – and the stock ticked back up, because, make no mistake, a Facebook first-morning discount would be little short of a calamity. A point not lost on shareholders of the Facebook games company Zynga, whose shares tumbled 13% on Facebook's so-so debut.
There is no shortage of debate on whether Facebook can justify its inflated $106bn valuation (at the time of writing). It has been well noted that its revenues fell in the first quarter of 2012 to $1.06bn, compared with the $1.131bn achieved in the fourth quarter last year. In the United States, where Facebook is clearly more mature, the company's ad revenue an hour is in line with the take for the proven and mature market of television, according to Enders Research. People in the US already spend 14% of their online time on Facebook (can there really be more growth in that?), which may explain why Facebook wins an estimated 14% of US online display spend. Perhaps in the world's largest economy Facebook is already mature.
Hold tight, though: there are plenty of arguments to keep the bulls happy too. Facebook's real prospects are to spread globally in the way that a single commercial broadcaster would never be allowed to do, not least in China, and to see if the company can develop a new line of business, hence all the speculation about getting into phones. Even on today's numbers, Facebook's revenues imply that each monthly active user generated just $4.11 last year; each daily active user $7.68. Compare that to ITV, to which about two-thirds of British people tune in every week; they are worth £43 a year to advertisers.
So given the difficulty of making predictions, it is possible to take whatever numbers you need to justify your position. What's interesting, though, is that most people argue that Facebook looks overvalued, yet we would not know what to do if that prediction came true. We have more invested in Facebook succeeding – because it is a more worrying question if it doesn't. The essential narrative of our times rests on the notion that technology is a constant motor of change, which brings with it great wealth.
Facebook, in this sense, is the heir to Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and above all Google, an extraordinary pipeline of companies. But it is also our lodestar for the next direction in media: if Facebook does not succeed, then perhaps all this talk of navigating the web through the medium of our friends was overrated; referrals to news websites, after all, still primarily come from Google.
Yet while Google's remarkable commercial success helps sustain the notion that there is a viable digital future out there for the rest of us, the failure of Netscape or the dotcom crash ought to lead us to consider that not every good idea becomes a global hit. And if Facebook falters on the stock market, there is no fresh company to take its place. MySpace et al have gone, and Twitter is a long way from generating the kind of cash that would allow it to excite.
Arguably, it would be more frustrating still if Facebook did quite well – growing by 50% a year rather than doubling, or whatever is required by the elevated valuation set by Wall Street. The credibility of social media would be dented, with a vocal group of frustrated investors – while those who pushed the valuation up to this level, and particularly those who sold out today, will have generated quite a return.
John Edwards Jury Looking at 'Bunny' Money - ABC News
The jury in John Edwards' campaign finance trial begins its second day of deliberations this morning in Greensboro, N.C.
The panel of eight men and four women spent about five hours behind closed doors on Friday as they began to weigh the evidence presented over nearly four weeks of testimony.
Shortly after they retired to the jury room on Friday, the jurors sent out a note to Judge Catherine Eagles, requesting a number of trial exhibits related to money provided by Virginia heiress Rachel "Bunny" Mellon in 2007.
The government alleges in count two of a six-count indictment that Edwards and his former aide Andrew Young illegally solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mellon as part of the effort to hide his pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign. Count three of the indictment contains similar allegations, but is focused on checks Mellon wrote in January 2008, shortly before Edwards ended his quest for the nomination.
Among the exhibits the jury requested is a letter Mellon wrote in April 2007 that is sometimes referred to as the "haircut" letter. Mellon wrote the letter to Young, shortly after the press had seized on the news that Edwards had charged a $400 haircut to his campaign.
"I was sitting alone in a grim mood - furious that the press had attacked Sen. Edwards on the price of a hair cut," Mellon's handwritten note reads. "From now on, all hair cuts, etc., that are a necessary and important part of his campaign, please send the bills to me. It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions."
Within six weeks of that letter Mellon began writing a series of personal checks that would eventually add up to $725,000 over seven months. The jury also requested copies of the first two of those two checks, which were funnelled to Andrew Young through an intermediary and eventually deposited in an account in the maiden name of Young's wife, Cheri.
Edwards' defense team has argued that Young was taking advantage of Mellon, bilking her out of the money with the pretense that it was for Edwards. They noted that the vast majority of Mellon's money went to Young and his wife, who used much of it to fund the construction of their $1.6 million home.
After the jury's request on Friday, an Edwards lawyer told a clutch of reporters in the courtroom that the deliberations could take a while. The jury appears, at least at the outset, to be taking a meticulous, count-by-count approach to their discussions.
Edwards is charged with conspiracy, accepting illegal campaign contributions and making false statements. If convicted on all six counts, he faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines. Practically speaking, any prison term is likely to be well below the maximum.
In addition to the money sent by Mellon, the jury must also consider the support provided to Hunter by Edwards' campaign finance chairman, Fred Baron, who funded a cross-country luxury odyssey for Hunter and the Youngs, after Andrew Young falsely claimed paternity of Edwards' child.
And they also must consider the broader question of whether the financial support provided by Mellon and Baron constitutes an illegal contribution under federal election laws.
At the close of the day the jurors informed the judge that they'd prefer to keep to a set schedule for deliberations, starting each day at 9:30 a.m. and calling it quits by about 4 p.m. The Middle District of North Carolina covers 24 counties and several of the jurors have long commutes to court each day.
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