Unearthing the hawala chains, IT department extols 'everyone must pay their share' term

New Delhi, February 12: We will target tax evasion and off shore tax havens.. Everyone must pay their share..! And the Income Tax Department in the national capital shoots up the nexus of the hawala operators who were running a money laundering racket estimated to Rs 20000 crores.

 

 

Official sources in the department said a series of raids and surveys were conducted by sleuths of the Delhi investigation unit of the I-T Department over the last few weeks in different business areas of old Delhi. “These operations led to unearthing of illegal financial activities by three groups of operators”, the official said.

A survey was conducted in Delhi’s Naya Bazar area, that led to detection of bogus billing of about 18 thousand crores. The group had floated a dozen bogus entities for providing fake bills, reported the official statement.

In the second case, a money laundering racket was unearthed where current transactions in shares were fraudulently camouflaged as being sales of old shares held for years. The magnitude of the purported scam is estimated to be over one thousand crores.

Hawala is a method of transferring money without any money actually moving. Interpol's definition of hawala is money transfer without money movement. Another definition is simply trust. Hawala is an alternative remittance channel that exists outside of traditional banking systems. Transactions between hawala brokers are made without promissory notes because the system is heavily based on trust and the balancing of hawala brokers books. Hawala, also known as hundi, means transfer or remittance.

The department similarly conducted searches against a group and found undisclosed foreign bank accounts and a well established racket of claiming bogus duty draw back or GST through over-invoicing of exports. Preliminary estimates of such bogus exports are more than 1,500 crore rupees.