TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
1989 (2) TMI 1
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....unting year ending March 31, 1951. The question referred by the Tribunal to the High Court at the instance of the Revenue was (at page 459 of 100 ITR) : "Whether, on the facts and in the circumstances of the case, the assessee-company could not be held to be a company in which the public were substantially interested within the meaning of the Explanation to section 23A(1) by reason of the fact that the shares of the company carrying not less than twenty-five per cent. of its voting power were not, in fact, freely transferable by holders to other members of the public for a large part of the previous year even though they were freely transferable as at the end of the previous year ?" Initially, the company was incorporated as a private....
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....l leave. As pointed out above, the short point for consideration in this appeal is as to whether the assessee satisfied the requirements of the Explanation to section 23A(1) of the Act so as to be entitled to the tax benefit. This court pointed out in the case of CIT v. Afco P. Ltd. [1963] 48 ITR (SC) 76 (p. 80) : "Section 23A was enacted to prevent evasion of liability to pay super-tax by shareholders of certain classes of companies taking advantage of the disparity between the rates of super-tax payable by individuals and by the companies. The rates of super-tax applicable to companies being lower than the highest rates applicable to individual assessees, to prevent individual assessees from avoiding the higher incidence of super-ta....
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....ctive parties is whether the shares were freely transferable by the holders to other members of the public in the course of the previous year. As we have already pointed out, the Income-tax Officer and the first appellate authority held that the terms of the Explanation required that the shares should have been freely transferable by the shareholders to other members of the public at every point of time during the previous year and transferability should be established by actual transfer. The Tribunal and the High Court took the view that it was not necessary that in fact there should have been some transfer of such shares but transferability as an incidence should have been at every point of time during the whole of the previous year. That....
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....he last day of the previous year, there would have been no necessity of expressing the position differently. There is abundant authority to support the stand of counsel for the Revenue that when the situation has been differently expressed, the Legislature must be taken to have intended to express different intention. "Course" ordinarily conveys the meaning of a continuous progress from one point to the next in time or space and conveys the idea of period of time ; duration and not a fixed point of time. "In the course of such previous year" would, therefore, refer to the period commencing with the beginning of the previous year and terminating with the end of the previous year. If that be the meaning of the phrase "in the course of such....