Custodian To Move Special Court On Harshad Assets
The scam custodian is set to move the special court of Justice S N Variava to seek directions, since the exercise of computing the assets of the Harshad Mehta group is proving difficult.
The custodian says the Harshad Mehta group is not co-operating with the process of ascertaining his exact assets up to the date of Mehtas notification under the securities scam.
B Bhattacharya, the custodian, said yesterday that the custodians office had appointed three chartered accountant firms to evaluate the HSM groups assets and a report would be ready by February 15. The report would be placed before the special court.
The three firms working on the computation of assets are Kalyanivala and Mistry, Kapadia and Damania and Natwarlal Vepari.
The custodian said the HSM group was reluctant to come forward with their books owing to which the putting together of the exact assets figure was proving difficult for the team.
Bhattacharya said he would be visiting Bangalore next to ascertain the progress on the compiling of assets of Fairgrowth Financial Services Ltd (FFSL), another notified entity. Fairgrowths assets are being put together by another chartered accountant firm.
The custodians office, meanwhile, has already lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court on a special courts judgement. The judgement addressed some questions of the law:
* whether the tax liability of the notified persons would include the penalty and interest,
* the period of liability up to which date is the liability applicable?
The court had ruled that the tax liability did not include the interest and penalty and that the date from which it would be applicable would be the date of notification.
On the certification process for tainted shares, he said though the deadline for issuing fresh certification forms had expired in August 1996, the issue of continuing certification was a different matter, and the forms already issued were being certified by the custodians representative at various centres.