MYSURU/BENGALURU : The Additional Civil Judge-3 and Judicial Magistrate First Class rejected the bail application of Mohammed Siddiq, the alleged kingpin of the Rs 180 crore GST scam involving steel scrap traders. The total amount traded was over Rs 1,000 crore.
The prosecution argued against granting him bail, so did the commercial tax and GST departments, who opposed the reief, fearing that once enlarged on bail, he could destroy evidence. Siddiq was seeking to come out on bail and the matter was taken up on Wednesday.
Siddiq had virtually set up a maze of fake suppliers. He issued fake tax invoices through fake registrations, misappropriating Input Tax Credit without remitting the taxes to the governments in the initial transaction. He and other culprits, including Imtiaz from Bantwal, could face serious charges under GST, IT and other penal sections related to economic offences.
Tax sleuths have been investigating the scam after they got the first whiff early in January. This concerns steel rerollers where scrap traders or kabadi wallahs used fake transactions to beat the GST collection on scrap, which is 18 per cent. The sleuths raided properties belonging to Siddiq and his associates, and found bank passwords and authorisation by many benami persons who are his accomplices spread across parts of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.