Income Tax dusts off cricketers’ files

NEW DELHI, JUNE 1: It's official now. The investigation wing of the Income Tax department in Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Hyderabad are alr...

NEW DELHI, JUNE 1: It’s official now. The investigation wing of the Income Tax department in Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Hyderabad are already making an assessment of income and assets of prominent Indian cricketers.

S C Parija, the Director General of Investigations (Delhi), said that as of now, they have identified and tagged the returns of some prominent players residing in Delhi. "We are already in the information mode but we don’t want to rush things. We will get into investigation mode once we have more specific information on the assets of these cricketers," he told The Indian Express.

It is understood that in New Delhi, the initial inquiries cover the records and returns of Kapil Dev, Ajay Jadeja and Manoj Prabhakar. The inquiries on Kapil Dev are said to be at a more advanced stage and that a synopsis of his I-T returns over a 10-year period have already been prepared by the Directorate. Kapil Dev’s returns reportedly show huge investments in properties located in different parts of the country.

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Besides the three players in Delhi, the I-T returns of former captain Mohammad Azharuddin in Hyderabad as well as Sachin Tendulkar and Sunil Gavaskar in Mumbai, among others, have been dug out from the record rooms and kept aside.

Sources say the I-T returns of former BCCI president Jagmohan Dalmiya have also been similarly earmarked by the Investigations wing of the department in Calcutta. The short-list of players and cricket administrators was prepared mostly on the basis of media reports containing allegations of them either being involved in match-fixing or in fixing deals for television rights for cricket tournaments.

"We want to be prepared with the returns if and when references from other investigating agencies come and that is why we have done this preparatory work," Parija said.

However, while the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has not yet passed on any written reference for an I-T inquiry into disproportionate assets of the cricketers, a verbal "sounding off" for the files has been made. The CBI has been informed that a majority of the returns have been traced and tagged and that the information can be passed on for joint investigation at a short notice.

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I-T officials say they are expecting that the CBI will pass on any information they get on the undeclared bank account, properties and income of the cricketers and prominent administrators. In several high-profile cases such as the Jain hawala case and those against Romesh Sharma and Chandraswami, it was the inquiries into disproportionate assets that withstood the test of time rather than those of the CBI or the Enforcement Directorate.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More