Is CBEC not aware of own SLP in SC?
IN the Circular No. 7/2013, covered above, Board states, the department is in the process of filling SLP against the said order. Assume the Circular is dated 19th February 2013 - the fact is that by that date,Department had already filed the SLP in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court had on 24th January 2013 condoned the delay and issued notice returnable in eight weeks. The petition was heard by the Supreme Court about 25 days before the above Circular was issued and the Circular states that the Department is in the process of filing SLP!
For the information of all the concerned officers, the Petition for Special Leave to Appeal is numbered as CC 2290/2013.
What does the Board want from the Supreme Court? The High Court was simply stating the Law as contained in the Customs Act. The Supreme Court had long ago (in 1959) observed, "Whenever a statute requires a particular act to be done in a particular manner and also lays down that failure to comply with the said requirement leads to a specific consequence, it would be difficult to accept the argument that the failure to comply with the said requirement should lead to any other consequence"
If the Department is not happy with Sections 110 and 124 of the Customs Act, they may as well amend them. Amending Acts is the easiest act for the Revenue Boards - no other department of the Government of India can manage to get legislation enacted and amended at will as the Revenue Boards can. An Additional Secretary in a Central Government Department once asked me as to how to get a statute amended retrospectively. I told him to simply draft the amendment and take it to Parliament and it will be passed - that is what the revenue Department does every year. He said, “But they have a budget every year and they can smuggle in all their retrospective amendments hidden in the voluminous budget papers - my department has not gone to Parliament with a Statute in the last fifty years; if I do it now, the entire focus of the nation will be on that amendment:.
Why should the Department take this kind of litigation to the Supreme Court, instead of asking their officers to complete the investigation within the maximum period of one year? The Department is before the Supreme Court for the simple reason that they could not issue the Show Cause Notice within the time stipulated. Incompetence masquerading as virtue before the highest Court!