KARACHI: The Intelligence & Investigation (I&I) Inland Revenue has lodged an FIR booking three persons for their involvement in receiving sales tax refund on fake and flying sales tax invoices.
The FIR nominates Abu Bakar, Proprietor of M/s Abu Bakar Enterprises, co-accused Muhammad Adil Ashraf, owner of M/s Zeenat Impex for availing undue benefit of SRO 549(I)/2008 and causing a loss of Rs48.963 million to the national exchequer.
According to the details, scrutiny of data related to the sales refund to the paper sector, revealed that in most of the cases, accused claimed huge refunds claiming to be the manufacturer, despite the fact that they did not have any manufacturing facility, which establishes the accused fraudulently obtained registration as manufacturers.
It is pertinent to mention that the co- accused Muhammad Adil Ashraf has already been arrested by the Directorate I&I Inland Revenue under FIR No.03/2013 dated February 02, 2015 and is under remand of the concerned department.
Further investigations are underway to arrest the main accused and his accomplices on account of their deceitful activities.
The arrested accused Adil in his statement said that he was just a name being used while the mastermind of the scam was someone else who had fled to Dubai.
He informed that bank accounts had been opened in his name and he had already signed 26 cheaque books which were in the possession of the mastermind whose name has not been disclosed.
Adil maintained that there were 14 persons and bank accounts had been opened in their names while they also had signed the cheaque books.
It was known that some major textile units taking benefits of SRO 1125(I)/2011 obtained invoices from the main accused so as to evade sales tax of 5.0 percent imposed on their unregistered suppliers.
It may be mentioned that DG I&I IRS Haroon Tareen has launched a campaign to plug revenue leakage and the entire Directorate is under directives to detect and establish cases of tax evasion.
Following these directives, Director I&I Shams-ul-Hadi, Additional Director Asim Iftikhar and Deputy Director Asif Abro detected this scam.