Hyderabad: Kesineni Tours and Travels, owned by Vijayawada MP Kesineni Srinivas (Nani), has coughed up Rs 2.3crore as service tax after the director general of Central Excise Intelligence (CEI) strongly took up a case of alleged tax evasion. It had been alleged that the company had collected service tax on bus tickets booked both privately and through online-ticketing agents (aggregators) from April 2015 to February 2016, but did not remit the same to the government. A CEI investigation revealed that Kesineni Tours and Travels “failed to pay the service tax it collected, to the exchequer, causing a loss to the Central government.”
Moreover, D. Satish Kumar, general manager (operations) and general power of attorney holder of the company, “deposed facts contrary to the evidence gathered so far. He himself appears to have been associated with acts of tampering of evidence pertaining to collection of service tax that was available in the data base,” the report said. Satish Kumar approa-ched the court of economic offences twice in 2016 which rejected his anticipatory bail. The CEI alleged that under Section 90 of the Finance Act, evasion of the tax is an offence. The Hyderabad HC also dismissed the plea of Kumar in November 2016.
Kumar claimed to this newspaper: “We paid Rs 2.3crore towards service tax for 14 months even though we did not collect any service tax during this time, soon after the notification. For the other period, we have been continuously paying service tax. There is no evidence with the CEI to say that we have evaded service tax. We have submitted all the records through the court to the DGCEI at different stages and they did not find any discrepancies. There could be some permit condition violations but there is no tax evasion. As we have paid the cash, we are hoping the case will be closed soon.”
