Trial court lets off Emaar MD in I-T case

NEW DELHI: In a relief to managing director of real estate major Emaar MGF Shravan Gupta, a trial court on Tuesday dropped the proceedings against Gupta after he informed it that the Delhi high court has quashed summons issued against him in a case filed by the income tax (IT) department for allegedly not furnishing details of his bank accounts.
Granting the relief to Gupta, the court noted that the high court in its April 6 order has quashed the summons issued against Gupta.“In this view, proceedings qua Shravan Gupta are dropped,” additional chief metropolitan magistrate Devendra Kumar Sharma said.
The high court has said that the trial court’s order of summoning Gupta as accused was liable to be quashed due to “technical reason”. The high court’s verdict came on Gupta’s plea challenging the trial court’s order of taking cognizance on the IT department’s complaint filed against him. The trial court had on February 27 summoned as accused Gupta whose name, along with those of others, has allegedly cropped up in the black money case.
The IT department had, in its complaint against Gupta, alleged that he had not filed the income tax return of USD 1.5 million for financial year 2005-2006 and when questioned and confronted by the department about it, he admitted it. It had alleged that he had later filed the income tax return and declared the amount in his income.
The department had said that on being asked by it, Gupta had refused to give his bank account details, after which the complaint was filed against him under section 276 D (failure to produce accounts and documents) of the IT Act. It said that after Gupta’s name cropped up in the HSBC Bank list, he had paid the tax after making a voluntary disclosure. According to the department, the HSBC Bank account was opened by Gupta in 2006 and it was closed in 2007 and tax was deposited by him voluntarily in 2011.