Jagat Jagdamba Flour Private Limited

Income-tax department on Wednesday conducted simultaneous raids at 20 premises of flour major Jagdamba Group in three states — Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal — leading to detection of suspicious investment of Rs 60 crore, recovery of Rs 51 lakh in cash and documents related to around 100 land deals. Sources in the department said, of Rs 51 lakh cash, Rs 46 lakh was recovered from the group's flat at Prabha Apartment in Kasturba Nagar, Dhanbad, while the rest Rs 5 lakh was recovered from a mill. Simultaneous raids were conducted at five business and residential premises in Dhanbad, five premises in Kolkata, six premises in Asansol, one premises in Bardhman and three premises in Hajipur, Vaishali (Bihar). Documents recovered from various premises show that the group members have purchased around 100 plots of land in recent years in several major towns in three states, including Muzaffarpur and Hajipur (in Bihar), Bardhman, Asansol and Kolkata (in West Bengal) and Dhanbad and neighbouring towns in Jharkhand, sources said. Sources said, group owner K M Choudhary hails from Hajipur where he was a very small businessman till 12 years back. He shifted to Dhanbad around 10 years back. Today, he and his brothers are owners of four rice mills and three flour mills located in the three states. A new rice mill is coming up in West Bengal, while one more flour mill is being set up at Muzaffarpur in Bihar. The recovered documents also show that Jagdamba group actually has only seven operating companies with annual turnover of around Rs 350 crore. But the group members run over 30 companies on paper, mainly to cover up bogus transactions to evade income-tax. The group's seven companies, in their income- tax returns, never showed profit of more than one per cent, though they set up altogether seven rice and flour mills one by one in the last seven years, sources said. "The documents seized also showed that one of the group companies had turnover of Rs 83 crore in financial year 2008-09, but the company in its tax return showed a turnover of only Rs 69 crore," a tax official, who was part of the raiding team, told TOI. To evade taxes, the group companies not only showed transactions through some Kolkata-based suspicious investors but also suppressed the quantity of production of flour and rice. When contacted, director, income-tax (investigation), Bihar-Jharkhand, Kumar Sanjay, confirming the searches said officials were examining the documents recovered from different premises. Complete outcome of the searches could be known by Thursday.