5 firm owners booked for Rs 19-cr GST fraud

Tribune News Service

Hisar, March 7

After detecting tax evasion and taking the input tax credit, the state Excise and Taxation Department has identified five shell firms that perpetrated the fraud under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) by cheating the department of Rs18.97 crore in Hisar district.

A spokesperson for the department said the police had registered five criminal cases against the traders who floated shell firms to deal in cotton. These traders forged the documents by preparing fake invoices and receipts which were used in claiming the ITC from the government under the GST norms.

Those who have been booked are Praveen Mehta, proprietor of M/s Krishan Cotton Industries, Hisar; Ankush of M/s Ankush Cotton & Ginning, Durjanpur village; Kamal Kumar, Sanjay Kumar and Manoj Kumar (all brothers), residents of Fransi village, Sonu of M/s Vishal Industries, Adampur and Vakil Chand of M/s Aggarwal Cotton Industries, Adampur.

They had been booked under Sections 406 (criminal breach of trust), 420 (fraud), 467 (forgery of valuable security, will, etc), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using forged documents or electronic records as genuine) and 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC.

In his complaint, Excise and Taxation Officer Mahavir Godara said during the site verification of these firms at the given addresses, no such establishments found existing.

The scam has taken serious proportions with Central GST teams, too, conducting raids at the offices of several cotton traders in Hisar, Sirsa and Fatehabad in Haryana, besides Punjab and Gujarat.

The CGST team had arrested four persons from Sirsa for allegedly forging documents to float bogus firms to sell cotton without paying the GST.