Searches by the Income Tax department at 30 locations related to two prominent Asansol-based groups in West Bengal have led to detection of unaccounted income exceeding ₹125 crore.
The groups are engaged in the business of iron and steel products, infrastructure, cement, poly fabs, agro tech and food processing. They indulged in unaccounted cash sales, inflation of expenses through claim of bogus purchases and routing of unaccounted income via accommodation entries for tax evasion.
The department found that the suspects had been using memory cards to store details of a parallel set of unaccounted sales, excel sheets of actual production data, parallel tally accounts files, cash payment details made to various parties and other related information. They have seized several such cards.
A preliminary analysis of the seized SD cards and the related evidence revealed that they contained details of the unaccounted cash handled by key employees of the directors and owners of the two entities. “The key persons of one of the groups have admitted that unaccounted income of more than ₹66 crore has been generated through unaccounted cash sales from its manufacturing units during the financial year 2020-21,” said the I-T department.
In the case of some other entities, the agency came across evidence related to the claim of unsubstantiated purchases. The directors admitted that “purchases” worth ₹20 crore were in fact undisclosed income.
Shell entities
According to the I-T department, several paper companies were used to provide accommodation entries to the flagship concerns. “These shell entities have been found to have routed back the unaccounted money of the group in the guise of share capital/unsecured loan into the books of account of these entities. It has been corroborated, with admission by directors of the entities concerned that the quantum of such routing exceeds ₹40 crore,” it said.
