Income-Tax Department raids Assam coal traders; detects Rs 150-crore black money

NEW DELHI: The Income-Tax Department has detected alleged unaccounted income of more than Rs 150 crore after it raided premises of "leading" coal traders of Assam, the CBDT said on Monday.

Search and survey operations were carried out last week on December 4 at 21 locations in Guwahati, Digboi, Margherita (Tinsukia district) and Delhi, it said.

Cash of about Rs 3.53 crore has been seized by the department, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) said.

"Handwritten documents and diaries of cash transactions have been recovered which are not reflected in the regular books of accounts. Such transactions detected so far across all the locations combined is upwards Rs150 crore, of which payments made of a total of more than Rs 100 crore have been found to be violative of various sections of the Income-tax Act," the CBDT said in a statement.

"Such seized documents are voluminous and are being investigated further," it added.

It, however, did not identify the parties searched.

The CBDT frames policy for the tax department "The main allegations against the group is that it has routed accommodation entries of more than Rs 23 crore and Rs 62 crore in the form of non-genuine share capital and non-genuine unsecured loans respectively, through certain Kolkata-based shell companies.

"All this was done by suppression of its true net profit," the CBDT said.

It said the raids "established" that the group engages in out-of-books transactions.

The CBDT alleged that loan transactions made in cash were also found to be more than Rs 10 crore.

"Stock difference of more than Rs 7 crore was found and no cogent explanation regarding the same was provided."

"In the office of the Kolkata-based shell company acquired by one of the entities of the group, no books of accounts and ROC mandated documents were found, proving the same to be a bogus entity used only to route unaccounted income of the group," it said.

Some cash investments in share capital "during demonetisation period" were also detected, the CBDT said.