The Supreme Court has cleared the way for the income-tax department to reopen assessments of the two sons of former Chief Justice of India (CJI) YK Sabharwal over share transactions that funded their purchase of a prime property on Delhi’s Sikandra Road in 2010, rejecting their challenge to the tax proceedings that had remained stalled for seven years.
As regards Chetan, the bench noted that although the assessing officer had examined aspects of the share transactions during the original scrutiny, the assessment orders did not reflect any conscious application of mind to the specific questions of share valuation, the investment of the proceeds in the Sikandra Road property or the claim under Section 54F. A bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran dismissed four appeals filed by Chetan and Nitin Sabharwal, upholding the validity of notices issued by the assessing officer (AO) in March 2015 to reopen their assessments for the financial years 2007-08 and 2008-09, corresponding to assessment years 2008-09 and 2009-10. The proceedings had been stayed by the Supreme Court in August and September 2019, pending consideration of their appeals against a Delhi high court judgment that had allowed the reassessment to proceed. Justice Sabharwal was a Supreme Court judge for seven years between 2000 and 2007, during which he served as the 36th CJI from November 2005 to January 2007.
The subsequent investigation had brought these aspects to light, the court said, and therefore the reassessment could not be characterised as a mere change of opinion.
The department also found that a substantial part of the proceeds had been channelled into the purchase of a property on Sikandra Road in April 2010, with the brothers claiming exemption from capital gains tax under Section 54F of the Income Tax Act. The Supreme Court, in its October 28 judgment, held that the investigation report by the director general, which came after the original assessments, provided tangible material for the AO to form a reasonable belief that income chargeable to tax had escaped assessment. The tax department’s investigation subsequently raised questions about the valuation of these shares, concluding prima facie that their sale prices were substantially higher than what could be justified by the cost of the underlying land and buildings.
It rejected the brothers’ argument that the reopening was based on a mere change of opinion, emphasising that the power to reassess cannot be confused with the power to review an earlier assessment.
