India on Thursday reiterated its intent to sign the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matter along with China and Saudi Arabia as part of the G20 Summit talks in Cannes.

Speaking at the meeting of G20 countries, secretary in the department of economic affairs R Gopalan said tax evasion and illicit flows were serious problems. India has negotiated 19 new double taxation avoidance agreements to check this trend over the past two years. In addition 22 existing double taxation avoidance agreements have been renegotiated. All these 58 agreements provide for tax information exchange according to international standard.

For such instruments to be effective, Gopalan suggested the need for building consensus on applying standards to past information, including banking information, so that earlier evasion is also investigated.

This was essential in the spirit of G20 London Summit that “the era of bank secrecy was over”, which had to be respected, he said.

Gopalan urged members of the G20 to lead by exchanging information automatically with their treaty partners and urge other countries to do the same.

Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia and Turkey signed the convention on Thursday, while France, Italy, Korea, Mexico, the UK and the US had already signed it earlier.