In a newly launched website, Jyoti, late Harshad Mehta’s wife, has made some big claims, nearly 21 years after Mehta’s death.
New Delhi: Income Tax officials will not take a relook at multiple cases of the late Harshad Mehta as demanded by his wife Jyoti.
The cases, a senior official told this reporter, will continue as per the law of the land.
In a newly launched website, www.harshadmehta.in, Jyoti made some big claims, nearly 21 years after Mehta died of a heart attack in a Mumbai prison where he was lodged along with his brother.
Her friends say there is some merit in her claims because she won many cases against the Income Tax officials. Still, on paper, it looks like the proverbial cry to save the sheep from the wolves.
Battling thousands of cases for nearly three decades and claims made by the Income Tax of a whopping Rs 30,000 crore and more, Jyoti said she and her family members have won 1,200 cases.
Now, the Income Tax officials say her family must make payments around Rs 5,000 crore, whereas Jyoti and her family members claim the demand should not be more than Rs 200 crore.
“After Harshad’s demise and suffering 3 rounds of illegal assessments we have already won more than 1,200 large cases and brought down the illegal demands from Rs 30,000 crore to Rs 4,000 crore and also secured refunds to the Custodian of Rs 814.33 crore and further refunds of about Rs 5,500 crores are already overdue and not being made by the I-T department.”
“Thus, we have thwarted the plan of the I-T Department and Custodian to get Rs 3,285.46 crore released to them by completely paralysing our organisation and hurting our ability to defend ourselves though at one point after Harshad’s demise this plan had already succeeded. In the process irreparable loss of Rs 20,677.28 crore is already suffered by us,” she wrote.
The Income Tax official said the department will not make her cases a special one and start re-looking at all the cases individually. It, claimed the official, is physically not possible. The case dates back to the early 90s.
Jyoti knows it’s not easy to retrieve cash from the Income Tax authorities, especially in a case as complicated as Harshad Mehta.
Mehta, popularly known as Big Bull, caused a huge stock market boom in the early 1990s by manipulating prices.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India’s top law enforcement agency, had arrested Mehta, the kingpin in the $1.3 billion stock market scandal in 1992. The scandal rocked the stock markets and left thousands of small investors poorer and shaken. Mehta and his two brothers, Ashwini and Sudhir, were charged with misappropriating millions of shares of 90 different companies.
The scandal crept into India’s political landscape when Mehta, in what many claimed was a swashbuckling display of negative publicity, announced he had paid a bribe of Rs 1 crore to the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. It was an explosive allegation. The government produced Delhi Police logs to establish that Rao was in his South Block office and nowhere near his Race Course residence at the time Mehta alleged he handed over the cash.
Now, Jyoti wants to turn the clock back. She is trying hard. Jyoti said when the remaining appeals are heard the claims of revenue would fall to about Rs 200 crore and this would entail further refunds.
“Thus, we have thwarted the plan of the I-T Department and Custodian to usurp Rs 3,285.46 crore released to them by completely paralysing our organisation and hurting our ability to defend ourselves though at one point after Harshad’s demise this plan had already succeeded. In the process irreparable loss of Rs 20,677.28 crore is already suffered by us,” she wrote.
But Income Tax officials say it will be a tough to establish grounds for relief asked for by Jyoti and her family members. Several major banks, including the State Bank of India, the country’s largest, found themselves short by hundreds of crores after making dubious loans to stock speculators. Such was the scandal that chairmen of several banks have been forced to resign and one committed suicide. Some banks were technically insolvent, hundreds of crores missing from their ledgers. Mehta, once considered Mumbai’s most flamboyant securities dealer, was found using forged documents to steal cash. Wrote Jyoti: “In these 20 years, our family has observed silence and completely stayed away from the media by not making a single statement on any issue touching our lives and the huge litigation that has got thrusted upon us since then and also about our continued sufferings and group punishment being meted out to us by the authorities only because we are related to Harshad even though we have not violated any law of the land. The proximate cause appears to us to be the revelations Harshad was compelled to make in the year 1993 about his meeting with the then Hon’ble Prime Minister, Shri Narasimha Rao on 04.11.1991 which fateful day changed our lives forever.”
Jyoti’s claims came soon after Moneylife produced an exclusive report on a court judgement that said the family’s repeated claims that they are due to get refunds over Rs 5500 from the custodian were not corrected.
Moneylife editor is Sucheta Dalal, one of India’s finest journalists tracking financial scandals. She had scooped the cases of Mehta in The Times of India and was feted by the government for her accomplishments. Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story, a series directed by Hansal Mehta on SonyLiv, was based on a book by Dalal and her husband, Debashish Basu.
The order, claimed by Moneylife, was issued by justice A.K. Menon of the special court set up for ‘expeditious’ hearing of the scam cases. The order further said the amount of claims made against the group were significantly higher than what was known so far.
Moneylife wrote: Justice Menon has not only dismissed the Mehta family’s application without costs, but has ordered that the special court registry “shall not register any further application for release of funds from attached assets for payment of fees payable by notified parties without leave of the court”.
It is going to be a tough road for the Mehta family.