[The following post is contributed by Prachi Narayan of Vinod Kothari & Company. She can be contacted at [email protected].] The Supreme Court in its judgment dated January 28, 2015 in Keshavlal Khemchand & Sons Pvt Ltd & Ors v. Union of India disposed off seventy petitions challenging the validity of the amended definition of Non Performing Asset (“NPA”) provided under section...
Guest Post – The IPL vis-à-vis Article 226: Is it Time to Characterize the Event?
[The following post is contributed by Sujoy Chatterjee who is an Advocate in New Delhi and an alumnus of the National Law University Jodhpur (’13)] Cricket enthusiasts are lauding the tough stand taken by the Supreme Court of India (SC) against the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) regarding the recent spate of Indian Premier League (IPL) controversies (IPL case). The SC came to be...
Delhi High Court on Constitutionality of Court Fee Amendment
[The following post is contributed by Gunjan Chhabra, who is an associate with Singhania & Partners, LLP and a graduate of Amity Law School, GGSIPU] Background and Facts Recently, the Court Fees Act of 1870 (the 1870 Act) was amended by the Government of NCT of Delhi by the Court Fees (Delhi Amendment) Act, 2012 (the Amendment Act), which came into effect from 1 August 2013. By way of this...
Constitutional Validity of Regulatory Regime for CIS Upheld
Earlier this week, a single judge of the Calcutta High Court in Rose Valley Real Estate & Construction Ltd v. Union of India upheld the constitutional validity of certain sections of the SEBI Act (including section 11AA) and certain provisions of the SEBI (Collective Investment Scheme) Regulations, 1999 (the CIS Regulations). Specifically, a challenge was mounted to amendments to the SEBI Act...
Petition on Composition of the Securities Appellate Tribunal
(The following guest post is contributed by Amit Agrawal, Advocate, regarding a petition filed before the Delhi High Court. Amit is representing the petitioner, although the litigation and its outcome will likely have a broader impact) A public interest litigation (PIL) has recently been filed before the Delhi High Court inter alia questioning the functioning of the Securities Appellate Tribunal...
The Constitution Bench elides repugnance and occupied field
That the title of this post is a part of Indian constitutional law is explained by the fact that the validity of tax and commercial legislation is often challenged on the ground that it conflicts with a similar legislation enacted by another legislature. Often the challenge is on the basis of legislative competence, and this requires a careful analysis of not only the words of Schedule VII, but...
Singur Land Act Held to be Unconstitutional
Last year, the West Bengal legislature enacted the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act, 2011 with a view to return land to the owners from whom it was previously acquired for purpose of establishing a manufacturing plant for Tata Motors. Since the project was stalled and subsequently relocated to another state, the issue pertains to the manner in which the land is to be dealt with. The...
Retailers Assoc. v. Union: Bombay High Court on Service Tax
In a previous post, I had briefly mentioned the judgment of a Division Bench (D.Y. Chandrachud and A.V.Mohta, JJ.) the Bombay High Court, where the constitutional validity of service tax on renting of immovable property was upheld. The judgment (Retailers Association v. Union of India) is available on the Bombay High Court website (linked here). A perusal of the judgment shows that three...
Developments in Taxation: Constitutionality of Service Tax; and Tax Planning through the “Mauritius Route”
The Bombay High Court has, in the past few weeks, decided two important issues: one pertaining to direct taxation, and the other to indirect. A Division Bench headed by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud has upheld the constitutional validity of service tax on renting of immovable property, as reported by Legally India. The arguments raised by the Petitioners were primarily that a “service” tax on...
UDF at Mumbai and Delhi airports
A Division Bench of the Supreme Court today declared that the User Development Fee [“UDF”] charged by the private operators of the Mumbai and Delhi airports is ultra vires. The judgment, reported as Consumer Online Foundation v Union of India, contains several observations that are crucial in ascertaining the proper scope of the public-private model [“PP”] in the aviation sector. This post set...
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