‘Acted as per IT Act’: IT dept’s replies to CCD founder VG Siddhartha’s letter

New Delhi: As operations are underway to find the missing Cafe Coffee Day founder VG Siddhartha, who went missing on Mangaluru, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) said the investigation against him “was not very serious and detailed”.

Siddhartha came under the scanner of income tax department and the Enforcement Directorate for alleged irregularities in his association with information technology company Mindtree Ltd.

A senior ED official familiar with the development said, “The probe against VG Siddhartha was largely being done by the IT department and the ED probe was not very serious. It was on alleged tax irregularities which the concerned tax department was looking into,” reported Livemint.

A letter which surfaced soon after he disappeared, addressed the directors to his company, Siddhartha said there was a lot of harassment from the Income Tax Department in the form of attaching “our shares on two separate occasions to block our Mindtree deal and then taking position of our Coffee Day shares, although revised returns have been filed by us”.

“This was very unfair and has led to a serious liquidity crunch,” he said.

Refuting the charges laid out in the letter, Income Tax sources said the provisional attachment made by the department was undertaken to protect the “interests of revenue” and was based on credible evidence gathered in the search or raid action, reported by Hindustan Times.

“The department has acted as per provisions of the Income Tax Act,” one of the sources told PTI.

Siddhartha, son-in-law of former union minister SM Krishna, asked his driver to stop his car on a bridge and told him to wait for him at the end of the bridge as he wanted to walk a bit. The driver waited for an hour and informed the family when Siddhartha didn’t return.

“He asked me to be at the end of the bridge and said he’d walk,” Siddhartha’s driver Basavaraj Patil has told the police. Siddhartha was reported missing from Jappinamogaru, which is very close to Netravathi river and just two to three kilometres from the sea.