Tamil Nadu retail chain hid Rs 1000 cr worth sales, finds Income Tax department in raids

Chennai: The Income Tax officials have unearthed suppression of sales to the tune of Rs 1000 crore and unaccounted cash purchases of nearly Rs 150 crore from search and seizure operations in Tamil Nadu.

Two groups belonging to a popular retail chain that sells jewellery, textiles and home appliances were the ones searched in the first week of December.

According to reports, it was the Saravana Stores group that was searched by the IT department. 37 premises linked to the group were covered in these searches.

Based on documents and incriminating material seized from the first group, the IT department has said that the firm had been actively involved in systematically suppressing sales by manipulating their accounts documents.

“The extent of suppression of sales is found to be more than Rs 1000 crore, over a period of several years.  It was also found, that, the assessee had made unaccounted cash purchases of about Rs 150 crore in textile division and jewellery division, during the past few years,” read the IT statement.

Searches on the second group had revealed that they had obtained bogus bills to the tune of Rs 80 crore and thereby suppressed taxable income, besides evidence of unaccounted purchase of gold.

“The assessee group is found to be debiting inflated making charges of jewellery. In addition, unaccounted rental receipts and the unaccounted scrap sales aggregating to Rs 7 crore have also been detected” said the IT department.

They added that Rs 10 crore in cash, jewellery/bullion worth Rs 6 crore were also seized from the two groups.