MUMBAI: The investigations into accounted funds of NDTV running into Rs 5000 crore is pointing to a massive collusion between the directors of the reputed media company and senior I-T officials, allegedly with the blessings of Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram.
The involvement of Sumana Sen, an IRS officer of the 1999 batch, is now under scrutiny after it emerged that her husband Abhisar Sharma was an employee of NDTV when she was appointed the Assessing Officer of NDTV Ltd, its group companies and all directors, including Prannoy Roy himself. It emerges that Sen and her husband enjoyed an all-expenses paid pleasure trip to Europe sponsored by Prannoy’s company.
S Gurumurthy, who was the convenor of the task force conceived by the BJP to assess black money illegally deposited by Indian politicians and businessmen in foreign banks, has now written to Roy to clarify why his company never bothered to inform the government or the Income Tax department that the wife of its employee had been appointed to assess it under all Direct Tax Acts.
“More importantly, Sumana Sen, when she became the Assessing Officer of NDTV in August 2004, never informed the government about the fact that her spouse Abhisar Sharma was employed with NDTV which was mandatory under rules…which entails imposition of major penalty including dismissal from the service,” Gurumurthy has noted.
In his defence, Prannoy Roy claimed that Sen was NDTV’s assessing officer only for a period of one year during which no substantive assessments of NDTV were made by her except one order under sec 143(1), and that all other assessments of that year were made by other I-T officers.
SPONSORED EUROPEAN HOLIDAY: PERK OR BRIBE?
It is relevant to note that at the point, NDTV had claimed a tax refund of Rs 1.47 crore, but a notice for scrutiny assessment u/s 143(2) was pending.
In March 2005, around five months after she had become the assessing officer for NDTV, she was offered through her husband Abhisar Sharma an “all expenses paid pleasure trip of Europe with her entire family” by the company. The total cost of the week long trip to the UK came to a whopping Rs 1 crore, which was entirely borne by NDTV. It was a luxury no other employee in Sharma’s grade had ever been offered. In fact, no other employee of NDTV had ever been given such a perquisite in its history.
Sequence of events:
March 21,2005: Sumana Sen writes to the government seeking permission for availing the offer with her husband.
March 28, 2005: Sen illegally passes an assessment order u/s 143 (1) of the Income Tax Act accepting the return of NDTV and granting a refund of Rs 1.47 crore.
April 8, 2005: The government grants her permission to avail the holiday in Europe on the condition that she should not have at any point in time had any official dealings with NDTV.
April 10, 2005: Sen furnishes fraudulent undertaking claiming that she was “not the Assessing Officer of NDTV Ltd, has never dealt with the case of NDTV and has never had any official dealings with it”.
April 12, 2005: Sumana Sen and her husband Abhisar Sharma take a British Airways flight to London to begin a week long holiday in Europe, which cost about Rs 1,00,00,000 to NDTV Ltd.
- Abhisar Sharma
Was husband’s job at NDTV ‘arranged’ by Sumana?
While Sumana Sen was brazen enough to lie about her relationship with NDTV despite just 13 days earlier having allowed an illegal refund as its assessing officer, Abhisar Sharma was hardly a passive bystander in all this. According to Gurumurthy, he had in fact “aided and abetted in all illegalities committed by Sumana Sen.”
According to documents and correspondence available with Mumbaiwalla, Sen’s husband was a “small time stringer” in BBC before he landed a job in NDTV as an anchor in October 2003. The big question now is whether it was merely a coincidence that just a few months later, the I-T department appointed his wife to assess the books of NDTV.
Preliminary verification of facts point to a well planned strategy by the husband wife duo. Sen was apparently “aided and abetted” by her superior (Prakash Chandra CIT, Delhi V) in getting her husband employed by NDTV.
With the tickets for the trip amounting to a couple of lakhs at most, it is unclear how the couple actually managed to spend Rs 1 crore in the short period between April 12 and April 20, 2005. Even after completing her luxury holiday, Sen failed to submit accounts of her expenses abroad, though it was mandatory under the rules.
It begs attention why NDTV would agree to pay Rs 1 crore for a holiday to Sen in exchange for a refund that amounted to Rs1.47 crore
In hindsight, the ‘Inspection Note’ filed by I-T Commissioner SK Srivastava in March 2007 over tax-evasion of about Rs 200 crore by NDTV and payment of bribe and illegal gratification to Sumana Sen was merely the tip of the iceberg.
Surprisingly, the observations on fraudulent assessments made on NDTV Ltd by Sen were not only set aside on March 29, 2007, the very next day Chidambaram – acting on the proposals of PK Mishra, DGIT (Vig) & CVO, CBDT – suspended Srivastava on allegations of sexual harassment, sexual assault, molestation and rape filed by two female I-T officers.
The officers in question were Sumana Sen and her batchmate, Ashima Neb.
NEWS Link:- http://mumbaiwalla.com/prannoy-sponsor-rs-1-crore-holiday-small-time-ndtv-anchor/
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