The Central Vigilance Wing of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has detected a massive scale of money laundering and tax fraud involving four private limited companies that were registered with different dummy directors on a single address in Karachi.
According to the FBR, these fake and paper companies were created for benefiting a powerful business group owned by a former parliamentarian of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). The companies dealt in metal and battery sectors and were used by many builders, businessmen, and politicians of Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, and KP to invest their black money.
The FBR said that these companies were registered on Plot No:B/D 187, Haroonabad, Shershah Karachi, but surprisingly, they were registered in FBR’s Corporate Tax Office of Islamabad with the assistance of FBR’s IT Company PRAL and some corrupt officials of FBR.
The FBR further said that these companies opened multiple bank accounts in various banks, which were used by many unregistered and non-filers. In these bank accounts, funds of Rs.16 billion rupees were deposited and withdrawn for whitening the money. These companies also generated fake invoices of Rs.10 billion rupees and made fake compliance of section 73 of Sales Tax Act 1990.
The FBR added that the funds deposited by some persons for whitening their black money were returned back to the same persons after routing via different accounts. These companies also made transactions to unrelated persons who were not in their business domain.
The FBR revealed that one of the companies, Power Source (Pvt) Ltd, is still operative on FBR portal, while the other three companies, T & S Metal Works (Pvt) Ltd, T & Z Enterprises (Pvt) Ltd, and MAQMF Enterprises (Pvt) Ltd, have been blacklisted or suspended in November 2023 nominally as an eye wash and no FIR was lodged.
The FBR stated that these four companies are registered over the names of poor employees who just get salaries of Rs.30 thousand per month.
The FBR claimed that the investigations in this case have been halted due to pressure from very powerful political quarters. The FBR said that no FIR has been lodged by the Corporate Tax Office-Islamabad as only blacklisting orders have been passed to evade the current pressure, which is mere an eye wash.
The FBR appealed to the public and the media to support its efforts to expose and eliminate this massive money laundering and tax fraud scheme, which is causing huge losses to the national exchequer and the economy.