Commercial tax dept detects Rs 30cr fraud by city based firm

AHMEDABAD: The state commercial tax department has detected tax evasion to the tune of Rs 30 crore by city-based ABC Cotspin Pvt Ltd. The company had claimed refunds and input tax credit (ITC) on the basis of fake transactions over four years.
Around 4-5 premises of the company in CG road, Relief road, Kalupur and Botad were searched by the officials.As many as four laptops and seven hard disks were seized by the officials during the search. The state commercial department has also initiated process of attachment of properties of the company and its directors Ashish Jobanputra, Bhavesh Thakkar and Ashwin A Patel.
The commercial tax officials had begun investigation in Rs 2.75 crore fake refunds claim case of city based MM Traders. ABC Cotspin Pvt Ltd was one of the companies which used to trade with MM Traders. “Upon scrutiny of returns of ABC Cotspin, we found that company had wrongly claimed Rs 11.73 crore of ITC on fake documents and transactions from April 2011 to August 2015,” said a senior official.
“ABC Costspin used to do these fake transactions with Sapna Sales and Max Impex of Relief road and Arya Cotton of Kalupur. These traders would forge bills and help the company claim fake refunds,” added senior official.
In another fraud, the company had claimed around Rs 7 crore of ITC through its branch. And with 150% penalty, the total tax to be deposited by the company in this case is around Rs 16 crore.
CBI has registered a case of cheating against ABC Cotspin and others for allegedly defrauding State Bank of India to the tune of Rs 430 crore by submitting forged bills. CBI had carried out searches at six places at Mumbai, Rajkot and Ahmedabad in this case on Wednesday.
It is alleged that the accused persons during the period 2012 to 2015 entered into criminal conspiracy to cheat the SBI, Rajkot Branch, CBI spokesperson said.
“In pursuance of the said conspiracy, the firm presented and got discounted 203 bills aggregating to Rs 396.43 crores from the said bank without attaching the shipping bills as evidence of the export. The public servants had allegedly discounted the bills without obtaining the requisite shipping bills and thereby caused a loss of Rs 430 crores (approx) to the State Bank of India,”
ABC Cotspin Pvt Ltd (ACPL) was incorporated in the year 2006 under Ashish Jobanputra. The Jobanputra family has been involved in the business of cotton trading for more than four decades. The business was started by Ashish's father in 1968 and since 1999, he has been handling the entire business operations. The company is engaged in the business of cotton exports, mainly to China, Hong Kong and a few other countries. The company has also started its own ginning units one each in Gujarat and Maharashtra which became operational from November 2011.