The Cabinet approved a stringent law to confiscate the assets of those who flee the country to escape being brought to account and cleared setting up of an independent regulator for auditors that is already permitted under the companies law. The decisions follow the ₹12,622-crore fraud at Punjab National Bank involving jewellers Nirav Modi , Mehul Choksi and their companies that went undetected for years, raising questions about the competency of audits at multiple levels.Finance minister Arun Jaitley said the government will try and get the Fugitive Economic Offenders Bill passed in the upcoming second half of the Budget session while details regarding the National Financial Reporting Authority (NFRA) will be issued soon.Modi and Choksi left the country before the fraud became public. The government has also been unsuccessfully seeking to get Vijay Mallya extradited from the UK for having defaulted on debt repayments of Kingfisher Airlines and being wanted for questioning over money laundering. Former cricket administrator Lalit Modi is another person the government has been trying to bring back without success.The fugitive Bill, which will apply with retrospective effect to all such persons as soon it comes into force as per the minister, will cover cases in which the total value is ₹100 crore or more to ensure less significant ones don’t overburden the special courts that will hear them.Once passed, the legislation will give the government power to attach all the assets of a person who’s been declared a fugitive and not just those acquired from the proceeds of criminal activity. This will also include benami assets. The government will also establish an international cooperative mechanism later to attach even the foreign assets of those declared fugitives.“We will try and make sure this is passed as expeditiously as possible because we can’t allow people to make a mockery of law that you first indulge in loot and then refuse to submit to the jurisdiction of our legal system,” Jaitley said, briefing the media about the decision. “I think we have a very responsible Parliament. It can’t come to the aid of such people,” he said when asked if he expected the law to be passed soon.The second leg of the Budget session will begin on March 6.Jaitley had proposed a stringent law for such offenders in his Budget speech last year with the department of economic affairs issuing a draft Bill for comments. The law will seek to allow the confiscation of assets without encumbrances, implying the government will be able to dispose of them quickly. It will also deny offenders the right to pursue civil claims in the country so that the process is not delayed in the courts.A court can declare a person a fugitive based on whether any of the offences listed in the law have been committed. Currently, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, the Enforcement Directorate provisionally attaches property acquired from the proceeds of crime and gets unencumbered right only after conviction. The process is usually a long-drawn one.An administrator will be appointed to manage and dispose of confiscated property under the fugitive Bill. “The existing civil and criminal provisions in law are not entirely adequate to deal with the severity of the problem,” the government said in a statement.The Companies Act provides for a National Financial Reporting Authority (NFRA) under Section 132 of the law.“The decision aims at establishment of NFRA as an independent regulator for the auditing profession which is one of the key changes brought in by the Companies Act, 2013,” the government said in a statement. The NFRA will have jurisdiction for investigation of chartered accountants and their firms engaged with all listed companies and large unlisted public companies, the threshold for which will be prescribed in the rules.This will likely curtail the role of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) that has been serving as a regulator as well.“The need for establishing NFRA has arisen on account of the need felt across various jurisdictions in the world, in the wake of accounting scams, to establish independent regulators, independent from those it regulates,” the government said.The government has been dissatisfied with the conduct of auditors. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had last year said some chartered accountants facilitated the laundering of black money after demonetisation.At the Economic Times Global Business Summit last week, Jaitley had said frauds take place despite multiple levels of auditing, with regard to the PNB case.