Bhubaneswar: The State GST Enforcement Wing Thursday arrested one of the prime accused in a fake invoicing racket worth around Rs 641 crore from the Capital city.
The accused identified as Basant Kumar Pattnaik along with his partners – Gurdit Dang and Sujay Maitra – had illegally availed and subsequently passed bogus Input Tax Credit (ITC) worth Rs 115.10 crore to various businessmen.
The enforcement wing had earlier arrested Dang and Maitra July 15, 2021.
Pattnaik is the owner of Omm Shree Ganesh Traders while Maitra is the Director of Smartageis Trade Venture Private Limited of Rourkela. Dang is the managing partner of Tirupati Traders and authorised representative of M/s Satguru Metals & Power Pvt Ltd.
The GST officials claimed that Pattnaik had confessed to the crime during the interrogation. He used to collect identity documents like PAN, Aadhaar, bank passbooks of gullible and tax-illiterate persons like the plumbers, drivers, unemployed youths and housewives from Rourkela, Jagatsinghpur, Sundargarh, Angul, Jharkhand and other places of the state.
He would collect the above documents ‘under the pretext of engaging them in different companies and in some cases to provide regular monthly income of Rs 5,000 per month’. Subsequently, the accused persons would use the documents fetched from the victims to generate GST registration numbers and open current accounts in different banks.
In this case, the State Commissionerate of CT &GST said, “After GST registration, Pattnaik, in collusion with others, was engaged in bill trading without actual receipt and supply of goods to defraud the State exchequer.”
Patnaik along with Amit Beriwal and Subash Chandra Swain had committed invoicing fraud worth Rs 219.61 crore and illegally passing ITC Rs 39.53 crore to traders. He committed the crime by creating six fake firms.