Officials of the Income Tax Department sent a notice to a Bengaluru auto rickshaw driver after they received a tip off that he had bought a posh villa worth Rs 1.6 crore. The auto driver, Subramani bought the villa in the city’s Whitefield area and Income Tax officials questioned him on Wednesday.
According to I-T sources, Subramani, bought a villa in a gated community – Jatti Dwarkamai Villas located in Whitefield, by paying Rs 1.6 crores in cash last year. I-T sources said that the complainant had alleged that Subramani may have stashed away money in benami accounts as he had never filed tax returns.
Income Tax officials, however, said that no search and seizure operation was conducted and that they did not seize any cash from Subramani’s home.
“We only wanted to know how he obtained the house. So a notice was issued to him with questions about how he procured the money to buy the property and so on,” the source said.
Sources say that Subramani received the money to buy the villa from an old woman in Bengaluru.
“She was struggling to get a cab or rickshaw on a rainy day, I dropped her home that day. I also dropped her back home on another occasion. Since then, we had an agreement that she would pay me to drop her and pick her up whenever she needed transportation. We became friends and when she heard that my family and I were struggling financially, she offered to buy us a house,” Subramani said.
Subramani also stated that whenever the woman visited Bengaluru, she stayed at the villa in Whitefield as his guest. Income Tax officials told TNM that Subramani has furnished proof for all his financial transactions and that he has no money stashed away in benami accounts.
The Income Tax Department had on April 16 this year sent notices to Jatti Engineering Pvt Ltd, the company that constructed the villa. The sleuths had requested the company to furnish copies of the ledgers pertaining to the sale of the villa to Subramani.
Preliminary investigations by the I-T department, however, has revealed that he is associated with a few politicians, including general secretary of State BJP and Mahadevapura MLA Arvind Limbavali, reported The Hindu. The MLA has gone on record to deny links with Subramani.
“No case has been registered against Subramani. We had issued the notice under Prohibition of Benami Property Transactions Act, 1988. We are still probing other angles in the case and also looking into whether the woman gave him the money,” the source added.