IT report on cricketers to be ready soon

Income tax authorities today said appraisal report on the cricketers raided by the department will be ready shortly and the report on the bookies and other associates would be completed by the year end.

Highly-placed IT sources said report on cricketers was "getting priority and if not all, some will be ready by next week".

Premises of seven cricketers -- Kapil Dev, Mohammed Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja, Ajay Sharma, Nikhil Chopra, Manoj Prabhakar and Navjot Singh Sidhu -- were raided by IT officials in a nation-wide swoop on July 20, 2000.

The sources said the report, which was running into several pages with annexures and documents seized during the raids, will be sent to assessing officers, who will then issue notices to the concerned cricketers.

In order to speed up the investigations, IT department has centralised all the cases here from Mumbai, Hyderabad, Calcutta, Bangalore and Ludhiana IT Directorates.

During the July swoop, IT officials had raided 86 premises of cricketers, their associates, administrators and bookies.

The sources said the report about bookies would be complete by the year-end after which the assessing officers would also summon them.

The CBI has also asked IT to provide details of at least two cricketers, against whom the agency was planning to initiate prosecution.

Even as a debate was on about whether the players and others named by CBI in its report could be prosecuted, the IT sources said the department would go ahead in the cases of undisclosed and unaccounted income detected during the nation-wide raid.

The "appraisal report" would be sent to assessment officers, to send show-cause notices to the players concerned for paying up taxes due against their names. The sources said that undisclosed and unexplained income would be termed as deemed income "automatically reopening" the cases for a block year of 1991/2001.

While detection of undisclosed and unexplained income would invite 60 per cent penalty without any interest or prosecution, subsequent detection of undisclosed and unexplained income would attract a hefty penalty for the defaulters, the sources said adding the "IT laws are very severe".

Meanwhile, the tax department has found some "new leads" over and above the CBI findings against the financial dealings of a bookie, who had emerged as a key player in the match-fixing case, the sources said without elaborating.

The sources said the department would investigate afresh these leads and confront the bookie with the evidence gathered.