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NEW DELHI: As the Special Investigation Team on black money completes one year in office, the government is in the process of setting up an investigation unit which will act as a permanent institutional mechanism to deal with probes related to black money both within and outside the country.The investigation unit is most likely to be headed by a commissioner-level officer and will function under the revenue department in the finance ministry. It will have officers drawn from the CBI, Income Tax, DRI and Intelligence Bureau, Financial Intelligence Unit and the Serious Fraud Investigation Office as part of the team to investigate cases, a source said.On Wednesday, India joined the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement along with France, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Indonesia and New Zealand on automatic exchange of financial information.Already this multilateral automatic information exchange body has 94 signatories, including Switzerland and many of the tax havens with which India has long been negotiating exchange of banking information related to its citizens.These 94 countries have committed to exchange information on an automatic basis from 2017 onwards as per the agreement.Coinciding with the signing of this pact, the Central Board of Direct Taxes on Wednesday issued a directive to its income tax officials to maintain secrecy on all such information and subsequent investigation of cases.The SIT on black money was notified on May 28 last year and as part of its mandate an institutional structure was to be created for probing cases related to black money.This 'separate infrastructure' of the SIT will conduct and coordinate a multi-agency probe on cases of black money both within and outside India, said a top finance ministry official.This is a departure from previous UPA regime where then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had constituted Directorate of Criminal Investigation within the Income Tax and had mandated it to probe all black money cases . Now, each case of black money will be subjected to a multi-agency probe under SIT's special investigation unit.The SIT is headed by Justice M B Shah, a retired judge of the SC, and heads of all the enforcement and intelligence agencies are its members.