I-T raids on Kannada film industry yield ₹109 crore

₹2.85 crore in cash and 25.3 kg gold jewellery seized

The assets seized in Bengaluru on Sunday.

The four-day search and seizure operations on personalities connected to the Kannada film industry have led to unaccounted income of ₹109 crore, the I-T Department said in a statement on Sunday.

However, it said: “The searches yielded incriminating evidence on many issues, but no admission has been made. The detection of concealed income will be much higher.”

Officials seized ₹11 crore worth undisclosed assets, including ₹2.85 crore in cash and 25.3 kg gold jewellery.

The raids covered film production companies, film producers, film financiers, and actors, the statement said. The raids focussed on three big budget films –

KGF, The Villain, and Nata Sarvabhouma. Premises of producers of these films — Vijay Kiragandur, C.R. Manohar, and Rockline Venkatesh — were searched as were those of stars who acted in them — Yash, Sudeep, Shivarajkumar and Puneeth Rajkumar — and a key distributor, Jayanna.

The searches that began on Thursday morning concluded on Sunday morning.

“The searches have been successful in unearthing evidence of suppression of income from film production, distribution and exhibition, as well as evidence of unaccounted cash expenditure in film production,” the statement said. Evidence of unaccounted theatre collections in cash and evasion of taxes has been found.

The statement further added that some of the evidence found such as diversion of cash collected by theatres would be of interest to other revenue and enforcement agencies and would be duly shared with them. This only indicated that the probe would only expand with GST Commissionorate and Enforcement Directorate (ED) likely to join the probe.

I-T officials had a word of advice and caution for the Kannada entertainment industry: “to follow laid down accounting standards by recording all transactions in books of accounts and pay due taxes”.