At 7,000 crore dues, LIC is India’s top tax defaulter

Ex-J’khand CM Madhu Koda, With 103Cr, Named In Individual Category
New Delhi: Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India, the country’s largest insurer, has over Rs 7,000 crore in tax demand pending against it. This makes it the biggest tax defaulter in the country. Among other defaulters are Aditya Birla Telecom, Vodafone Infrastructure and Bharat Petroleum, data given by the income tax department under RTI showed.

The list of top 10 pending tax demands in each category was given to activist Subhash Agrawal in response to his RTI application seeking the list of top tax defaulters.

The tax demand raised by the department against LIC is for the assessment year 2010, which is pending “as on date”, the response furnished on January 27, 2014, said.

In the companies category, the top slot was given to LIC, which also had the biggest pending tax demand in all the other categories, according to the RTI reply. The demand against LIC was Rs 7,027 crore, followed by Aditya Birla Telecom (Rs 2,372 crore), Vodafone Infrastructure (Rs 2,038 crore), Idea Cellular (Rs 1,517 crore ) and Bharat Petroleum (Rs 1,494 crore ).

Other companies with pending tax demand include Nerka Chemicals (Rs 1,354 crore), Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (Rs 1,234 crore), Andhra Pradesh Beverages Corporation (Rs 1,228 crore), HDFC Bank (Rs 1,051 crore) and IndianOil Corporation (Rs 874 crore).

In the individual category, those with pending tax demand included Sanjay Singal (Rs 280 crore), followed by Sukesh Gupta (Rs 155 crore) and former Jharkhand CM Madhu Koda (Rs 103 crore).

“This is to state that this office is only having a list of wherein demand is pending as on date... Now how many or which of the demand comes or not comes under a particular section wherein the assessee is deemed to be in defaulter, such linking is neither available nor possible to be collated by this office,” additional I-T director Ashish Abrol said in the response.

The ‘trust’ category is led by Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, with pending tax demand of Rs 654 crore, followed by the Jamsetji Tata Trust (Rs 290 crore), the Board of Control for Cricket in India (Rs 167 crore), Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (Rs 162 crore), NEIA Trust (Rs Rs 83 crore), UP Forest Corporation (Rs 51 crore) and Divya Yog Mandir Trust (Rs 41 crore), among others.
Courtesy:
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
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Wiki: Fernandes sought CIA funds

New Delhi: Diplomatic cables released on Monday by Wikileaks claimed that senior JD-U leader and former convenor of NDA, George Fernandes sought funds from the Central Intelligence Agency during the Emergency and asked French labour attache Manfred Turlach to suggest CIA contacts.

The US labour counsellor was also approached by a Fernandes acquaintance to arrange a meeting between him and the US ambassador, the cables said in a revelation that suggests the socialist leader was ready to forego his political allergy of the US to seek monetary assistance to fight the Indira regime.

In his conversations with Turlach, Fernandes is shown claiming that he had a band of 300 people involved in sabotage activities liking blowing up railway bridges in the south and a bridge between Mumbai and Pune besides setting Mumbai dock and the LIC building in Chennai on fire. One cable showed Fernandes stating in November 1975 that “he was even prepared to accept money from the USA”.

Fernandes, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, couldn’t be contacted. The socialist leader, who burst into the national spotlight after be brought the country to a halt by a railway strike, was not perceived to be friendly to the US. He shut down the operations of Coca Cola and IBM when he was industry minister. However, his animus towards the Congress, especially during the Emergency, may have pushed him to take extreme measures, including seeking US assistance.

A trade union colleague of Fernandes said, “In the battle between means and end, he has rarely let means come in the way of end. It does not surprise me that George sought CIA help and as a minister in the Janata government, threw Coca Cola and IBM out of the country.”
Courtesy:
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
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