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No service tax on maintenance of minimum bank balance as Banking Services consideration
Canara Bank v. Union of India (W.P. Nos. 10234/2020) For millions of bank customers, the requirement to maintain a minimum average balance is an ordinary part of holding a savings or current account. The bank may prescribe a minimum amount that must be maintained during a particular period. If the customer fails to do so,…
Not Every Group Allocation Is a Service: CESTAT Draws the Line on Intra-Group Taxation
Commissioner of CGST & Central Excise, Dehradun v. Dana India Private Limited, Service Tax Appeal No.50734 of 2019 The Tax Department’s Broad View of Group Expenses Multinational enterprises routinely incur expenses at the headquarters level. These may relate to finance, human resources, legal functions, information technology, engineering, business development, investor relations, external audits and corporate…
Software Subscriptions, Specialised Services and the Limits of Treaty Taxation
Cloudera Inc., USA vs ACIT (ITA No .- 917/Del/2023) The Growing Complexity of Software-Based Revenue The taxation of cross-border software payments has become increasingly difficult as technology businesses have moved away from selling packaged products and towards subscription-based platforms. A single customer agreement may now cover access to software, cloud-based functionality, implementation assistance, training, technical…
When a Business Advance Is Not Income: Karnataka High Court Rejects “Virtual Forfeiture” Theory
The Tax Treatment of an Unsettled Advance Tax disputes often arise when a receipt remains on the books for longer than the Revenue considers commercially reasonable. An advance that was initially recorded as a liability may, after several years, begin to look to the tax authorities like money that the recipient has effectively acquired. The…
Lord Hartley William Shawcross – The Nuremberg Hero Extraordinaire
BY Anoop Bose. One of the greatest lawyers the world has ever known was Lord Hartley William Shawcross, the prodigious British barrister and politician and the lead British prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Shawcross was born on 4th February,1902, in Giessen, Germany. His father John Shawcross, who belonged to a miller’s family in Rochdale, Greater…
Healthcare Services Remain Exempt Under GST Despite Delivery Through Another Hospital
Healthcare Global Enterprises Ltd. – WP No. 22236/2023 – Karnataka HC I. Introduction One of the defining features of the Goods and Services Tax regime has been the conscious decision of Parliament and the GST Council to keep essential public welfare services outside the tax net. Among these, healthcare services occupy a unique position. Unlike…
FMV of underlying companies’ shares cannot determine share valuation under the unamended Rule 11UA
ACIT v. Kanchan Markhedkar (ITA No. 713/Mum/2025 and ITA No. 784/Mum/2025) I. Introduction The relationship between tax avoidance doctrines and statutory valuation rules has often produced some of the most challenging questions in Indian tax jurisprudence. While courts have repeatedly recognised the Revenue’s power to disregard sham transactions and colourable devices, they have been equally…
Tribunal Prefers NCLT-Determined Valuation over Mechanical Rule 11UA Computation
Rajasehar Buvaneswari v. ITO (ITA No. 3332/Chny/2025) I. Introduction The valuation of unquoted equity shares has emerged as one of the most contested aspects of contemporary income-tax jurisprudence. Over the last decade, the legislature has introduced several anti-abuse provisions to discourage understatement of consideration in transactions involving privately held shares. Among these, Section 50CA of…
Justice Surya Kant: A Jurisprudence at the Crossroads of Formalism and Realism
“The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” When the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. penned those words, he was urging the legal world to look past rigid textbooks and see the breathing, complex reality of human life. Decades later, Roscoe Pound expanded on this vision, arguing that the…
“Where It Appears” is not “Reason to Believe”: The Madras High Court Recalibrates the threshold in Section 74 of the GST Enactments
A reading of Fastenex Private Limited, Turbo Energy Private Limited and Ispahani Estates Private Limited v. State/Central Tax Authorities (Madras HC, 08.06.2026) On 8 June 2026, Justice C. Saravanan of the Madras High Court disposed of a cluster of writ petitions, filed by M/s. Fastenex Private Limited, M/s. Turbo Energy Private Limited and Ispahani Estates…