The Income Tax Department carried out search and seizure operation on a group of companies engaged in the business of manufacture and distribution of medicine and real estate development, on June 29.
The search operation covered 25 premises in Delhi-NCR and Haryana, the Ministry of Finance said in an official statement on Friday.
A large number of incriminating documents in the form of loose sheets and digital data have been seized. These documents reveal that the group was involved in cash sales of pharmaceutical medicines that were unaccounted. Large amounts of purchases, payments of wages and other expenses were also found to have been made in cash.
An insider of the company also admitted about the entity’s involvement in cash sales of pharmaceutical medicines, including cash receipts through hawala to Afghanistan. The preliminary analysis suggests that the seized hawala cash receipts amount to about Rs 25 crore. The company also deals in Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API), and its unrecorded stock has been found to be in surplus by Rs 94 crore.
It is also found that the revenue generated by unaccounted cash sales has been invested in purchase of immovable properties, and in expansion of manufacturing facilities of Pharmaceutical medicines. The real estate entities of the group are found to be engaged in out-of-books sale and purchase of properties in cash.
The group has also been booking bogus Long Term/ Short Term Capital Losses in the securities market to offset the capital gains earned on such property transactions. The amount of such bogus losses is estimated to be around Rs 20 crore.
The search action has revealed that the group has also floated benami entities to purchase immovable properties in the state of Himachal Pradesh.
So far, unaccounted cash of Rs 4.2 crore and jewelry worth Rs 4 crore have been seized.
Further investigations are in progress.