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The Surat Income Tax department has unearthed alleged undisclosed transactions worth Rs 2,500 crore done by two major jewellery manufacturing firms, retail shops associated with them and a bullion company in a 133-hour-long search carried out in Surat and Rajkot.

The firms allegedly underreported their business and were doing three times more business without disclosing it, officials said.

The searches uncovered business links of Surat-based Parth Ornaments Private Limited, among the top jewellers in the state, and Tirth Gold, its sister company, with Akshar Jewellers, Kantilal Brothers Jewellery and Harikala Bullion of Surat city. A team of 150 I-T officials, led by Additional Director of Investigations, Vibhor Badoni, carried out the searches at 35 locations in Surat and two in Rajkot, including secret rooms, residences, and other places linked to the companies from 6.00 am on September 13 and went on till Monday evening.

An official who was part of the searches, on condition of anonymity, said Parth and Tirth had hired a Rajkot-based software company to help them store a majority of their sales data on cloud servers in other cities to enable them to under-report the books of account.

The officials have recovered data on Parth and Tirth from the software company. The officials have also recovered several documents from the five firms. These are being scrutinised. They have also seized 10 bank lockers of these firms.

We have not seized jewellery as it is part of their business. We suspect that cash might have been hidden in some secret place and we are trying to find it out. We have retrieved sales data of five years from Parth and Tirth, and found that they have done business transactions to the tune of Rs 2,500 crore without disclosing it on the books of account. The investigation is still in progress, but the searches have ended, an official said, on the condition of anonymity.

Parth Ornaments has two jewellery factories in Surat and has over 1,000 employees. The firm, which began around 10 years ago, has shops across the country. Tirth Gold, which is also into gold manufacturing, is owned by a cousin of the promoters of Parth Ornaments.

According to sources, Akshar Jewellers and Kantilal Brothers are into the retail jewellery business, and a majority of their sales transactions are done in cash and have not been shown in the book of accounts. The officials have also seized several documents that were kept hidden by the firms and not disclosed to the I-T department.

The bridal jewellery range at Kantilal Brothers starts from Rs 10 lakh onwards, apart from its retail jewellery sales. We have also found unaccounted stock of Rs 100 crore from these five firms. The data recovered from the bullion firm is also being analysed. The exact figures will be revealed after that, the official added.

The Indian Express (P) Ltd

First published on: 18-09-2023 at 23:50 IST

Original post:
I-T unearths unaccounted trade worth Rs 2.5K crore from jewellery, bullion firms - The Indian Express