TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
1983 (1) TMI 244
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.... by the importing mills, which were stated to recite the terms of the agreements of sale between them and the petitioner. The Tribunal, however, recorded a finding that these letters cannot be accepted as genuine, but must be held to have been fabricated later. The letters were supposed to have been written within a matter of days of the importing mills getting into their hands the import licences. According to the Tribunal, it was improbable that the petitioner could have entered into a bargain with the importing mills so soon after their having obtained the licences and even before the shipments had left the UAR ports. The Tribunal noticed internal evidence in the correspondence itself to enable them to infer that it must have been a subsequent concoction. The assessing authority had pointed out in its order of assessment that the documents relating to the imports between the Egyptian cotton merchants in the UAR and the three importing mills in this State had not seen the light of day in the assessment proceedings. The Tribunal found that even the letters and the invoices made out by the importing mills in the petitioner's favour in respect of these purchases were not found enter....
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.... of individual bargains, or the whims of the contracting parties, either. For that would only complicate the task of assessment, and also render decision-making for the taxing authorities a very difficult and prolonged affair. The legislature accordingly laid down certain rules of thumb for the determination of the situs, or locale, of sales and purchases for the special purposes of making good the charge to sales tax. In the all India context, such rules of thumb were found to be quite indispensable in order to demarcate the taxing power of each and everyone of the States and making it fool-proof against the temptation to levy and collect taxes on sales or purchases taking place outside their own borders. Article 286(2) empowered Parliament to make the requisite clarifications. Parliament did so in section 4(2) of the Central Sales Tax Act, 1956. On the language of article 286(1)(a) of the Constitution, Parliament might well have laid down principles to decide under what circumstances a sale or purchase would fall outside all the States in India, that is to say, outside the Indian Union altogether. But section 4(2) of the Central Sales Tax Act, limited itself to fixing the locale ....
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....ace value, the question is how far the case of the petitioner has been made out by the contents of those letters. One of the letters is extracted in full in the order of the Appellate Assistant Commissioner. It is said that the letters from the other two mills were also on identical terms. We have perused the full text of the letter extracted in the Appellate Assistant Commissioner's order. The letter does not bear out the petitioner's contention that the goods were specific goods as on the date of that letter. By "specific goods" means goods already identified, not merely those which are identifiable and which, with an effort in that direction, can be identified, sooner or later. This is how the petitioner's vendors describe the state of the goods as at the date of the contract: "The consignment is lying in any of the ports of the UAR for shipment." The description is as vague as vague can be. The petitioner's vendors have referred to the goods as lying in some port or other of the UAR. This indicate, only one thing: that the UAR has more than one port, probably, a number of them, and the petitioner's vendors did not know for certain in which port and in which place the goods....
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....den is clearly on the petitioner to show in what way the transactions are exempt from, or fall outside, the scope of the taxing provisions. In the absence of materials in that directions, we must accept the finding of the Tribunal that the assessee's purchase of Egyptian cotton under the purchase contracts in question must be held to have taken place inside the State. There is no dispute that the cotton which was the subject-matter of purchase from three importing mills was put into the petitioner's spinning mill and converted into yarn. This makes the cotton the subject of the last purchase in the State, chargeable, at that point, to single point levy under item 2 of the Second Schedule to the Tamil Nadu General Sales Tax Act, 1959. We, therefore, hold that the assessment was properly made in this case and rightly confirmed by the Tribunal in appeal. We are referred to what was described as a "special term" in the contract between the petitioner and its three vendor mills. Reliance was particularly placed on the following clauses: "Kindly note that, despite any term to the contrary or not provided herein, the property in the goods shall be deemed to have passed to you when signi....