A Swiss bank account is shorthand for having illegally earned money, which is then stashed away in Switzerland's banks as that country's laws empower the banks to protect the identities of their clients. There are several such havens where such monies can be stashed away.

Gurumurthy will know this. Many of his clients would, no doubt, be having such accounts. One case readily comes to mind. In the late 1980s, when his friend and mentor Ramnath Goenka was charged with illegally paying for machinery imported by the Indian Express group through Swiss banks, Gurumurthy crafted an ingenious defence. He said that the money was a "hand loan" from a "reputed Swiss jurist"—a Doctor Muller, if I remember right.

Now we know that every second lawyer in Switzerland also serves as a fiduciary (trustee) for his overseas client, who may not be able to directly operate his/her account. And every two-bit lawyer can be passed off as an eminent jurist. The purpose of referring to this is not to rake up an old and obviously undecided case, but to draw attention to the flexibility with facts and stretch of imagination that are Gurumurthy's hallmarks.

The BJP report alleges that Rajiv Gandhi had over 2.5 billion Swiss francs in his name in an unnamed Swiss bank, and attributes this to a story that appeared in the November 11, 1991 issue of a lurid pictorial magazine, Schweizer Illustrierte. The story whose focus is on the money stashed away by Imelda Marcos, wife of the late Philippines dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, has a box with photographs and names of persons with alleged holdings in Switzerland.

Now, in November 1991, Rajiv Gandhi was dead for several months. And the charge that he held nearly ₹10,000 crore in a secret Swiss account is ludicrous. This amount is equal to about 10% of the 1991 Union budget, and India's foreign exchange reserves then were just over ₹4,000 crore. Even today, when India has over fifty dollar billionaires, many of whom are Gurumurthy's friends if not clients, ₹10,000 crore is still a lot of money. The total kickback amount implied in the Bofors deal—the biggest corruption case of the 1980s—was, by today's standards, a tiddly-widdly ₹64 crore. Even if Rajiv Gandhi got all of it—even Gurumurthy would not say this was the case since his friends, the Hinduja brothers of London, too, got some of the Bofors commissions—there would have had to be a huge number of similar deals. Now, that just didn't happen during Rajiv Gandhi's five years as prime minister.

Apart from this, Gurmurthy et al conclude that all transactions covered in the IMF report 'Cross-Border Investment in Small International Financial Centers', which estimates such transactions to total $19 trillion, is black money. This is a gross misreading of the report. The report lists out country-wise transactions through these havens, but nowhere does the study refer to this money as black money or criminally-obtained money