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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Saradha crisis: Mamata hikes VAT on tobacco for relief fund- Romita Datta

Saradha crisis: Mamata hikes VAT on tobacco for relief fund- Romita Datta

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published Published on Apr 25, 2013   modified Modified on Apr 25, 2013
-PTI


Mamata Banerjee stages reversal of former apathy towards fate of those affected by Saradha Group demise

Kolkata: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee staged a reversal of her former apathy towards the fate of those whose savings had disappeared amid the collapse of the deposit-taking Saradha Group.

Having said on Monday that "what has gone, has gone", Banerjee on Wednesday announced a 10 percentage point hike in value-added tax (VAT) on tobacco products to raise money for a `500 crore rescue fund.

Either the consumer or the provider, or both, of tobacco products will pay for Banerjee's largesse, which will be distributed among the worst affected by the demise of the Saradha Group, one of the biggest deposit-taking companies in West Bengal and its neighbouring states. It has already claimed two lives: an agent and a depositor killed themselves last week.

Banerjee announced her decision on a day the political blame game between the state and the centre over regulating such financial enterprises escalated with the leak to television channels of a letter written by Sudipta Sen, chairman and managing director of the Saradha Group, to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

In that letter, which the CBI in New Delhi confirmed it had received, Sen purportedly gave details of payments made by him to key officials to defuse investigations launched against the Saradha Group's deposit-taking business, which the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on Tuesday declared as illegitimate, capping a nearly three-year-old inquiry.

Cigarettes and other tobacco products will attract VAT of 35% in West Bengal, higher than neighbouring states such as Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar, which tax tobacco products at 20-30%. Tax arbitrage between states typically encourages inter-state smuggling of cigarettes by wholesalers.

Tobacco companies pay VAT on the price invoiced by them to wholesalers. State-specific pricing is unviable and encourages smuggling even more, so if ITC Ltd-India's biggest cigarette maker-were to raise prices to protect its margins, smokers across the country will be paying for a financial fraud in West Bengal. If it doesn't, its margin will contract in West Bengal because the company will have to reduce its selling price to wholesalers.
ITC declined to comment on the development.

On Wednesday, television channels flashed Sen's letter to CBI, in which he supposedly says that he was spooked when Sebi launched its probe against his firms in 2010. Banerjee used this to launch a scathing attack on the centre for not intervening despite being aware of the fast-spreading menace among West Bengal's rural poor-her core political constituency.

The letter, however, also says why Sen entered the media business, which, according to him, eventually became his nemesis. He says he bought Channel 10, a Bengali news channel, to take on Sangbad Pratidin, a Bengali newspaper owned by a Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha member, after it launched an attack on the Saradha Group for its deposit-taking business.

Before long, he got into a content-sharing agreement with Sangbad Pratidin and appointed Kunal Ghosh, its editor, as chief executive officer of Channel 10 and eventually of the Saradha Group's media business, to buy peace. He got into the agreement with Sangbad Pratidin to "protect my business from the government", Sen says in the letter.
Srinjoy Bose, a Trinamool Congress, said the party had nothing to do with the Saradha Group and that his newspaper only had a content-sharing agreement with Channel 10, rebutting allegations that he had promised immunity for Sen's businesses. Ghosh, who is also a Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha member, could not be contacted.

Sen's purported letter makes clear that the Saradha Group wasn't left with any money to repay depositors, except for properties spread across West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand and Assam, details of which are among legal documents left in six trunks at the group's head office in Kolkata. The police have recovered the trunks and the property documents, but their worth isn't immediately known.

Sen, who was arrested in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday, estimates his "actual liability" at `300-400 crore, about one-third of what the Saradha Group's computer accounts showed: `1,200 crore. He attributed the difference to a bug in the accounting software, which allowed executives and so-called marketing members-collection agents-of the group to print fake receipts.

Sen's claim had an air of déjà vu about it. The last big financial fraud in eastern India, the payment crisis at the Calcutta Stock Exchange (CSE) in 2001, was also eventually blamed by the joint parliamentary committee that probed it on a software snafu that allowed stockbrokers to extend their outstanding financial risk without paying the necessary margin.

Even stockbrokers from Mumbai were found to have routed their trades through partners in Kolkata, who traded on CSE, to take advantage of the bug in the bourse's software that calculated margins.



Live Mint, 24 April, 2013, http://www.livemint.com/Politics/N1oCIfU6cZeBEeItoMO99J/West-Bengal-to-institute-Rs500-crore-relief-fund-for-the-dup.html


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