New Delhi: The attachments of over 780 benami assets, worth crores, risk being invalidated because of the government’s failure to create a designated adjudicating authority in the 19 months since enforcing a stringent law against black money and corruption.
The Centre had amended the Benami Property Transaction Act of 1988 and enforced the tighter version on November 1, 2016, days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonetised 1,000-rupee and 500-rupee notes.
Section 7 of this law prescribes seven years’ jail and a fine up to 25 per cent of the market value of a benami property – one held by a real or fictitious person on behalf of another who has actually paid for it.
But the law also requires the government to create an independent, three-member adjudicating authority that is to decide the validity of any attachment of a property by the income-tax department under this law.
In the absence of such an authority, the government has entrusted these cases as a "transitional" arrangement to the already short-staffed and overburdened adjudicating authority for the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
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