Dismissing the appeal\u00a0 of the revenue the Court held that the search and the issuance of notice under section\u00a0153C\u00a0pertained to the period prior to June 1, 2015 and section\u00a0153C\u00a0as it stood at the relevant time applied. The change brought about prospectively with effect from June 1, 2015 by the amended section\u00a0153C(1)\u00a0did not apply. Therefore, the onus was on the Department to show that the incriminating material or documents recovered at the time of search belonged to the assessee. It was not enough for the Department to show that the documents either pertained to the assessee or contained information that related to the assessee. The Department had relied on three documents to justify the assumption of jurisdiction under section\u00a0153C\u00a0against the assessee. Two of them, viz., the licence issued to the assessee by the Director, Town and Country Planning and the letter issued by him permitting the assessee to transfer such licence, had no relevance for the purposes of determining escapement of income of the assessee for the assessment year 2005-06. Consequently, even if those two documents could be said to have belonged to the assessee they were not documents on the basis of which jurisdiction could be assumed by the Assessing Officer under section\u00a0153C\u00a0. The third document, the statement made by the searched party during the search and survey proceedings, was not a document that “belonged” to the assessee. While it contained information that “related” to the assessee, it could not be said to be a document that “belonged” to the assessee. Therefore, the jurisdictional requirement of section\u00a0153C\u00a0as it stood at the relevant time, was not met. No question of law arose. ( AY. 2005 -06)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
S. 153C : Assessment – Income of any other person – Search – Search took place prior to date of amendment- Burden is on department to prove seized documents belonged to assessee \u2014 Statement of searched party containing information relating to assessee- Documents are not belonging assessee- Wrongly assumed jurisdiction- No question of law . [ S. 68 ,132(4) ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digest"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9S2Rw-27R","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8175"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8816,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8175\/revisions\/8816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}