TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
2022 (1) TMI 864
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....sioner of Central Excise (Appeals), Nagpur and order-in-original no. 12/2011-12/C dated 21st November 2011 of Commissioner of Central Excise & Customs, Nagpur which, for the period October 2007 to July 2008, confirmed duty liability of Rs. 1,97,98,599 under section 11A of Central Excise Act, 1944 and, for the period between August 2009 and July 2010, ordered recovery of duty Rs. 1,03,12,523 under section 11A of Central Excise Act, 1944 respectively along with applicable interest under section 11AB of Central Excise Act, 1944 besides imposing penalty of like amount under rule 25 of Central Excise Rules, 2002 on the assessee and on the Director of the appellant-company. 2. Essentially, the proceedings initiated in the respective show cause n....
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....ance was placed on the decision of the Hon'ble High Court of Allahabad in Commissioner of Central Excise v. RA Castings Pvt Ltd & others [(2011) 269 ELT 337 (All)] as upheld by the Hon'ble Supreme Court and of the Hon'ble High Court of Jharkhand in Om Shanti Steel & Castings Pvt Ltd v. Union of India [(2017) 347 ELT (Jhar)] and in Balashri Metals Pvt Ltd v. Union of India [(2017) 345 ELT 187 (Jhar)] on the unreliability of standards as the basis for inferring clandestine production and clearance of manufactured goods. 4. It was also contended that the production slips, pertaining to December 2001 and November 2002 and relied upon to uphold the demand, seized in February 2004 lacked credibility in the absence of confirmation through experim....
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....Authorized Representative that the decision of the Tribunal in the challenge to demand for the earlier period had been based on certain evidence therein which did not apply to confirmation of the present demand. According to her, the resolution of the dispute in favour of the assessee by the Tribunal for the earlier period had been based on the observations pertaining to the reliance placed on the study conducted by Indian Institute Technology, Kanpur (famously referred to as the technical report of Dr NK Batra), the computation of power consumption on the basis of private production slips of an even earlier period and the trial production under central excise supervision which differed vastly from the basis adopted by the adjudicating auth....
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....nace for the period spanning the production recorded in the slips to the period of the present proceedings did, in conjunction with the shortage of raw materials and the unaccounted procurement of bazaar scrap, make the reliance on production slips of 2002 acceptable. 8. It is also contended that the authenticity of the production slips maintained by the employees of the appellant-assessee, the practice of reverse computation of material deployed, the non-availability of heat register for the impugned period and the acknowledgement of the documents in the statement of the appellant-Director suffice to establish the legality and propriety of the impugned order. 9. There is no doubt that, for the appellant-assessee, electrical energy is the....
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....fficiency over a period of time; particularly so, when consumables play a not insignificant role in the manufacturing process. The gap between energy consumption, as determined from the production slips, and the claimed consumption for the impugned period may appear to be improbable but that does not, of its own, signify impossibility. The absence of any corroborative evidence and, indeed, of any trail of investigation into the supply chain puts paid to the hypothesis of clandestine production. The concatenation of income from the weighbridge with sale of clandestinely removed goods is a proposition that remains merely so in the absence of any evidence, however remote, and the jurisdictional competence of central excise authorities to deman....