Finance minister Arun Jaitley is unlikely to attend the G-20 finance ministers and central bank chiefs? meeting in Cairns, Australia, on September 20 and 21, as he is recovering from a diabetes management surgery.
Minister of state (finance and commerce) Nirmala Sitharaman will attend the meeting instead. Jaitley, who underwent the procedure on September 2, was discharged on Wednesday and attended the cabinet committee on economic affairs meeting later in the evening. Although still recuperating, he is likely to be in his offices at the finance and defence ministries from Thursday, a senior government official told FE.
A finance ministry spokesman also confirmed that Sitharaman will be going to Cairns for the G-20 meeting. Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan and a few other senior government and RBI officials are also expected to attend the event.
Jaitley was admitted to the Max Super Specialty hospital in South Delhi on September 1 and underwent a planned elective laparoscopic procedure the next day. The surgery was successful and the statement released by the hospital then indicated that he would be released in a few days? time.
The meeting in Cairns will serve as a precursor to the G-20 Heads of State summit in Brisbane, Australia in November, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to attend. Among other things, the G-20, a group of developed and developing nations, is likely to discuss automatic sharing of tax information. India, which has seen an increasing number of tax avoidance cases, and other major economies have been pressing for an effective system for getting financial information from other nations, especially jurisdictions which aere considered tax havens. The G-20 finance ministers are also likely to deliberate on concrete steps to push global GDP by an additional 2% by 2018.