I-T moves SC to reopen Vodafone case

The government on Monday moved the Supreme Court seeking a review of its January judgment that struck down the income tax department's demand for $2.2 billion from Vodafone over the UK company's acquisition of Hutchison's stake in Hutch-Essar in 2007. The department wants the matter heard afresh by a larger seven-judge bench. It has pointed out that the January judgment, delivered by a three-judge bench headed by the then chief justice SH Kapadia, had erroneously interpreted a 1985 ruling by a five-judge bench in the McDowell's case.

The I-T department has sought the reopening of the case while challenging a different Gujarat High Court order which had absolved the company from payment of any capital gains tax on the demerger of its passive infrastructure assets.

Additional documents filed by the department seeking a reconsideration by a larger SC bench has stated that the rulings in the Vodafone case and the Azadi Bachao case (2004) "require to be overruled, as they are in conflict with the decision of a Constitutional bench of five judges in McDowell case (1985)".

The application has quoted justice Chinnappa Reddy's observations in the McDowell's case regarding the need to depart from the "Westminster" principle as emphatically as British courts have done. Quoting from the 1985 judgment, it has highlighted that the "proper way to construe a taxing statute, while considering a device to avoid tax, is not to ask whether the provisions should be construed literally or liberally, nor whether the transaction is not unreal and not prohibited by the statute, but whether the transaction is a device to avoid tax, and whether the transaction is such that the judicial process may accord its approval to it".

Quoting the same judgment, the application continues: "There is the large hidden loss to the community by some of the best brains in the country being involved in the perpetual war waged between the tax-avoider and his expert team of advisers, lawyers and accountants on one side and the tax-gatherer and his perhaps not so skilful advisers on the other side."

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