Vellore Member of Parliament Durai Murugan Kathir Anand has preferred a couple of writ appeals against the dismissal of two of his writ petitions challenging the Income Tax Department’s move to get ₹11.48 crore — recovered from the residence of a couple in Katpadi during the 2019 Lok Sabha election — added to his income for 2019-20 and demand tax with interest.
The appeals have been listed for admission before a Division Bench of Justices R. Mahadevan and Sathya Narayana Prasad for Thursday. Justice C. Saravanan had dismissed the petitions and refused to accept his claim that the money did not belong to him. The judge said the evidence gathered by I-T sleuths, prima facie, appeared to be “overwhelmingly” against the petitioner.
He pointed out that the cash was recovered from the house of Damodaran and Vimala Damodaran on April 1, 2019. The money was found in packets mentioning the names of municipal wards under the Vellore Lok Sabha constituency. After the seizure, Ms. Vimala’s brother S. Srinivasan came forward and gave a voluntary statement that the cash belonged to him.
He claimed to have earned the money through real estate business and said it was intended to be distributed to the voters for securing the petitioner’s victory. Observing that the statement suggested “corrupt practice in the parliamentary election either by the petitioner or his party [the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam],” the judge said the records, however, indicated that Srinivasan was not a man of sufficient means.
There was also no evidence to show that the money was given to him by the party to indulge in corrupt electoral practice, the judge said.
“On the other hand, there is a preponderance of probability that the cash belonged to the petitioner... The fact that certain documents pertaining to the colleges run by Durai Murugan Educational Trust of the petitioner were found along with the seized cash shows that cash belonged to the petitioner and it was not disclosed by the petitioner in his regular I-T returns,” he wrote.
Just because Srinivasan had come forward and given a sworn statement claiming ownership of the seized money, it would not mean the tax liability could be shifted to him. “The subsequent engineering of an application for settling the dispute before the Income Tax Settlement Commission by Mr. S. Srinivasan appears to be a mere ploy or ruse to divert attention,” he added.
Despite dismissing the petitions, the judge granted liberty to the MP to prefer a statutory appeal against the assessment order before the Appellate Commissioner within 30 days and directed the latter to dispose of any such appeal within 60 days. Till then, the recovery proceedings were ordered to be kept in abeyance.
