Former India cricket captain Sourav Ganguly has challenged before the Calcutta High Court a service tax claim of over Rs 3 crore, which was charged during his term with the Kolkata Knight Riders for IPL and playing for Team India.
“While the original claim is of Rs 1.51 crore for the period between April 2006 and March 2010, another Rs 1.51 crore is in the form of 100 per cent penalty on the amount, which we have challenged before the high court,” said his counsel Amitava Mitra from the law firm Sinha and Company.
“The application is likely to come up before a bench of the high court on Tuesday,” his counsel said in Kolkata on Sunday.
Ganguly decided to move the high court after service tax commissioner K.K. Jaiswal upheld the claim of the department in November, 2012. The claim was made in September 2011.
The service tax demand was made under two components — business support service and business auxilliary service, he said.
“The claim for business support service relates to Ganguly’s role in advertisements and other promotional activities for the KKR. But he has already paid over Rs two crore as tax,” he claimed.
“Ganguly was also charged service tax for playing cricket for the Indian team and other playing interests during the term. But under the Finance Act, players are not liable to pay service tax on earnings from playing,” his counsel claimed.
Keywords: Sourav Ganguly, KKR service tax claim, Kolkata Knight Riders
Tax dept should have two layers of assessment.Of which one layer should be eminent public which will be paid a incentive for locating assessment shortfall. This should done secretly and fast.Then all cases of disputes will vanish from the court
Tax avoidance has been there from the beginning of tax collection.They take advantage of delay in courts. What the tax evaders do is to tie up the case in the lower courts which is already clogged with millions of cases and take their time about five to six years and move to high court where it will be delayed for another 4 years and finally they do a bargaining to pay in installments etc or they go bankrupt and pay no taxes. What the government can do now ?
Like in USA the tax authorities should have their own courts only for taxes and ability to do a jeopardy judgment . Which means the tax court can issue warrants on their own, issue judgements to deposit half the money owed etc so that the evaders can no more play games. There will be one appeal and no more and they cannot go Supreme Court unless there is a violation of constitutional rights of the defendant. This way the cases can be disposed of in five to six months . It is time we separate the tax cases from other case
When farmers are comitting suicide due to poverty in our country, our cricketers who earn crores of rupees every year are refusing to pay their fair share of taxes. Shameful !
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