DGGI officials bust network involving fake invoices worth more than Rs 4,500 crore; mastermind held

NE BUSINESS BUREAU
NEW DELHI, JAN 14

The statement said that a syndicate of 636 firms were involved in the case.

“The mastermind of syndicate has accepted that they have issued only invoices in these firms and not supplied any goods against them. They have issued invoices involving taxable value of approximately Rs 4,521 crore having input tax credit implication of approximately Rs 741 crore,” the statement said.

The case came to light after some bogus firms were booked by the DGGI recently, which were non-existent at their principal place of business. To trace the real persons behind these fake firms, the physical address from where GST returns were actually filed was ascertained. Then search was conducted January 6 at that place in Delhi, the statement said.

It was found that the proprietor was allegedly engaged in providing ‘cloud storage’ on his servers to various customers for maintaining their financial accounts. A scrutiny of the server led to detection of the syndicate based in Kolkata, DGGI said. Searches were conducted at various places in Kolkata on Monday, January 10.

During search huge amount of incriminating documents, including mobiles phones, various cheque books, stamps of various firms and SIM cards have been recovered. On analysis of electronic devices, documents, mobiles and e-mail of these persons, it has been found that these persons are remotely maintaining data on the server found at the premises in Delhi.

During the course of investigation, GST amounting to Rs 4.52 crore has been got deposited by reversal of ITC available in the ITC ledger of these firms. Further, till now approx. Rs 7 crore lying in various bank accounts of these firms has been frozen. The mastermind behind the whole racket has been arrested on Thursday, January 13.

Further investigations in the case are on.