Quick answer: In Commissioner of Central Excise, Aurangabad v. M/s Millennium Beer Industries Ltd., pronounced on 3 September 2026, a Division Bench of the Bombay High Court’s Aurangabad Bench (Nitin B. Suryawanshi and Abasaheb D. Shinde, JJ.) dismissed the Revenue’s appeal under Section 35G of the Central Excise Act, 1944 against a CESTAT order that had held a service tax demand of Rs. 21,92,03,724, raised on a brewery’s contract-bottling arrangement for the period 23 September 2009 to 15 November 2011, to be barred by limitation. The Court held that the extended period of limitation under the proviso to Section 11A of the Central Excise Act, 1944 (applied to service tax through Section 83 of the Finance Act, 1994) could not be invoked because the show cause notice contained no specific averment of fraud, collusion, wilful misstatement or suppression of fact, applying the Supreme Court’s ratio in Uniworth Textiles Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise, Raipur. It further held, applying Birla Corporation Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise and Union of India v. Kaumudini Narayan Dalal, that the Revenue could not press this appeal having already accepted an identical Tribunal order in favour of a similarly placed assessee, SAB Miller Breweries Pvt. Ltd., on the same facts and the same ground.
Key Takeaways
- The extended period of limitation demands a specific, fact-based averment of fraud or suppression in the show cause notice itself — a bare invocation of the proviso is not enough. Following Uniworth Textiles, the Court held that the burden of proving mala fide conduct under the proviso to Section 11A of the Central Excise Act, 1944 lies on the Revenue, and that a show cause notice which does not specifically plead which of the statutory defaults (fraud, collusion, wilful misstatement or suppression, with intent to evade) is attributed to the assessee cannot sustain a demand raised beyond the ordinary limitation period.
- The “Principle of Consistency” bars the Revenue from accepting a Tribunal order for one assessee and appealing an identical order against another on the same facts. The Court treated this as “sacrosanct in revenue matters,” relying on the Supreme Court’s holdings in Birla Corporation Ltd. and Kaumudini Narayan Dalal that the Revenue cannot take a different stand where the facts of two cases are “almost identical,” and that doing so without just cause is itself a ground to decline to examine the correctness of the impugned order.
- An appeal under Section 35G of the Central Excise Act, 1944 lies only on a “substantial question of law.” The Court held that a Tribunal’s finding that a demand is time-barred, being a finding of fact on the record, does not become a substantial question of law merely because the Revenue frames it as one — the High Court declined to re-open a factual finding that was “neither erroneous nor perverse.”
- A dispositive limitation finding can leave a genuinely contested valuation-timing question undecided. The Revenue’s second framed question — whether the appointed date of amalgamation approved by the erstwhile Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR), rather than the date of the Registrar of Companies’ certificate of incorporation, governs when a post-amalgamation service tax liability crystallises — was never separately answered; the appeal was disposed of entirely on limitation and consistency, leaving that question open for a case where it is outcome-determinative.
- The reasoning is confined to the legacy service tax and central excise regime but rests on an evidentiary principle with a live GST-era analogue. The judgment construes Section 11A of the Central Excise Act, 1944 and Section 83 of the Finance Act, 1994 — provisions that remain in force, unamended, for pre-GST period assessments — so its ratio is undiminished for pending legacy disputes; whether an identical fraud/suppression threshold protects a GST assessee from an extended-period demand raised under Sections 74 or 74A of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 is a distinct question this judgment does not address and on which regime-specific case law must be consulted separately.
1. Introduction
A show cause notice that arrives roughly two years after the last of the transactions it targets, invoking a five-year period of limitation without saying why the ordinary one-year period should not apply, is a recurring feature of central excise and service tax litigation — one the Supreme Court has disapproved of since its earliest readings of Section 11A of the Central Excise Act, 1944. The Bombay High Court’s judgment in Commissioner of Central Excise, Aurangabad v. M/s Millennium Beer Industries Ltd., delivered by its Aurangabad Bench on 3 September 2026, applies that settled learning to a large, fact-heavy dispute: a Rs. 21.92 crore service tax demand on a brewery’s contract-bottling arrangement with its brand owner, spanning a corporate amalgamation whose exact effective date the parties disputed.
The judgment is useful for three reasons. First, relying on Uniworth Textiles Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise, Raipur, it holds that the extended period of limitation is not a formality invoked by reciting the proviso — it requires a specific, fact-particular averment in the notice itself of fraud, collusion, wilful misstatement or suppression with intent to evade, the burden for which rests on the Revenue throughout. Second, and less commonly seen in a reported excise judgment, the Court gives independent, dispositive weight to what it calls the “Principle of Consistency” — the Revenue’s inability to accept a Tribunal ruling for one assessee while appealing an identical ruling against another on materially the same facts. Third, the judgment shows how a limitation finding can dispose of an appeal entirely, leaving a genuinely interesting question — the effective date of a service tax liability spanning an amalgamation — undecided for want of necessity. This article traces the Court’s reasoning issue by issue and considers what the limitation and consistency holdings mean for legacy indirect tax litigation, and for GST practitioners weighing how far the same evidentiary threshold travels into the current regime.
2. Case summary and background
2.1 The transaction and the demand
M/s Millennium Beer Industries Ltd. (“MBIL”), then a unit of the “UB Tower” group situated at Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore, operated a manufacturing facility at Plot No. L-10, MIDC Waluj Industrial Area, Aurangabad. Under an agreement dated 1 April 2005 with M/s United Breweries Ltd. (“UBL”), MBIL manufactured and sold alcoholic beverages to UBL’s customers and indenters, acting on UBL’s instructions — a brand-owner and contract-bottling arrangement common in the Indian brewing industry, under which the bottling unit pays the brand owner a fee (here, described in the record as Rs. 5 per case) characterised for tax purposes as consideration for “Intellectual Property Service,” on which service tax had already been discharged.
The Department’s Directorate General of Central Excise Intelligence gathered intelligence and commenced an investigation in 2010 into MBIL’s arrangement with UBL for the period 23 September 2009 to 15 November 2011. That investigation culminated in a show cause notice-cum-demand notice (No. DGCEI/I&IS “D”/30-113/2012/11351) dated 19 December 2012, demanding service tax of Rs. 21,92,03,724 together with interest under Section 75 of Chapter V of the Finance Act, 1994, and proposing penalty under Sections 76, 77 and 78 of that Act.
2.2 Adjudication and the Tribunal’s order
The jurisdictional Commissioner adjudicated the notice and, by Order-in-Original No. 21/ST/COMMR.2014 dated 30 April 2014, confirmed the service tax demand of Rs. 21,92,03,724 with interest, together with penalty under Sections 77 and 78 of the Finance Act, 1994. MBIL appealed under Section 35B(1) of the Central Excise Act, 1944 (applicable to service tax appeals via Section 83 of the Finance Act, 1994) to the Customs, Excise and Service Tax Appellate Tribunal, Mumbai, in Service Tax Appeal No. ST/88407/2014. By order dated 11 July 2019 (Order No. A/86241/2019), the Tribunal allowed MBIL’s appeal, holding the demand time-barred.
The Revenue — by then reconstituted as the Commissioner of Central GST and Service Tax, Aurangabad — carried the matter further, filing Central Excise Appeal No. 1 of 2020 before the Bombay High Court’s Aurangabad Bench under Section 35G of the Central Excise Act, 1944, framing two questions it characterised as substantial questions of law: first, whether the Tribunal was correct in holding the demand time-barred given that the UBL arrangement had, on the Revenue’s case, never been disclosed to the Department; and second, whether the appointed date of amalgamation (1 April 2010, sanctioned by the erstwhile Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction, “BIFR”) or the later date of the Registrar of Companies’ certificate of incorporation (16 November 2011) should be treated as the effective date governing MBIL’s service tax liability for the relevant period.
2.3 The parties’ contentions and the Court’s disposition
MBIL raised a preliminary objection to the appeal’s maintainability: an identically circumstanced assessee, SAB Miller Breweries Pvt. Ltd., had received an identical demand on the same grounds, and the Tribunal had allowed SAB Miller’s appeal (No. ST/85828/2014) on the same reasoning as MBIL’s — yet the Revenue accepted the Tribunal’s order in SAB Miller’s case while challenging the identical order in MBIL’s case. On the merits, MBIL submitted that the pre-amalgamation transaction with UBL had been disclosed to the Revenue, that service tax on the Intellectual Property Service component had already been paid, and that even taking the amalgamation’s appointed date of 1 April 2010 (not itself in dispute), the show cause notice issued on 19 December 2012 came roughly thirty months later — well beyond any permissible period.
The Bombay High Court, having heard both sides, dismissed the Revenue’s appeal in its entirety on 3 September 2026, holding that the appeal raised no substantial question of law within the meaning of Section 35G, that the extended period of limitation was unavailable to the Revenue, and that the principle of consistency independently barred the appeal. The Court did not separately adjudicate the Revenue’s second framed question on the amalgamation’s effective date.
3. Legal analysis
3.1 The Principle of Consistency as an independent, dispositive ground
The Court’s first substantive holding addresses MBIL’s preliminary objection. Comparing the SAB Miller matter with MBIL’s case, the Bench found the date of the show cause notice, the date of the Order-in-Original, the date of amalgamation, the period of demand, and the computation of the demand by the original authority “substantially identical,” and noted that the ground on which the Tribunal allowed both appeals was also the same. On that basis, the Court held that the Revenue had “applied different yardstick[s]” by accepting the Tribunal’s order for SAB Miller while challenging the identical order for MBIL.
The Bench grounded this holding in two Supreme Court authorities cited by MBIL’s counsel and adopted by the Court as central to its reasoning. In Birla Corporation Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise, the Supreme Court held that the Revenue cannot take a different stand where “the facts are almost identical,” particularly once it has taken a “conscious decision” to accept a principle in one case and does not challenge it. In Union of India v. Kaumudini Narayan Dalal, the Supreme Court held that if the Revenue did not accept the correctness of a judgment in one assessee’s case, it should have appealed that judgment rather than accepting it and later challenging an identical position in a different assessee’s case “without just cause” — and that where it does so without such cause, the Court may simply decline to examine the correctness of the impugned order. The Bombay High Court treated the combined effect of these authorities as establishing that the “Principle of Consistency is sacrosanct in revenue matters,” and that permitting the Revenue to take inconsistent positions on identical facts would be “contrary to the principles of fairness and equity” — its own formulation, echoing the concern the Supreme Court itself had voiced in Birla Corporation that inconsistent stands would place both authorities and assessees “in a quandary.”
This holding does real work independent of the limitation point: even had the Court found the extended period properly invoked, the consistency finding would, on its own terms, have been sufficient to dismiss the appeal. Practitioners should note that the doctrine as applied here operates at the level of the Revenue’s litigating conduct — its decision to appeal or not appeal an identical Tribunal order — rather than at the level of the underlying tax liability; it is a discipline on departmental conduct in litigation, not a substantive exemption from tax.
3.2 The extended period of limitation requires a specific averment, not a recital
Turning to the merits, the Court identified “the only question that arises for consideration” as whether the Revenue could invoke the extended period of limitation. Section 35G of the Central Excise Act, 1944, which the Court set out in full, confines a High Court appeal from a Tribunal order to cases involving “a substantial question of law,” requires the Court to formulate that question, and confines the hearing to the question so formulated (subject to the proviso permitting the Court to hear an unformulated substantial question of law for recorded reasons).
On the limitation question itself, the Bench relied on the Supreme Court’s decision in Uniworth Textiles Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise, Raipur, reported at (2013) 9 SCC 753. Although Uniworth Textiles arose under Section 28 of the Customs Act, 1962, the Supreme Court there had treated Section 28 as “analogous” to Section 11A of the Central Excise Act, 1944, and had held — quoting its own earlier reasoning in Aban Loyd Chiles Offshore Ltd. (which in turn quoted the Supreme Court’s decision in Collector of Central Excise v. H.M.M. Ltd. construing Section 11A directly) — that the proviso extending the limitation period from the ordinary period to five years applies only where the show cause notice contains a specific, particularised averment that duty escaped by reason of fraud, collusion, wilful misstatement or suppression of fact, with intent to evade payment. The burden of establishing such mala fide conduct lies squarely on the Revenue, and absent a notice that puts the assessee on notice of precisely which of the several statutory defaults is alleged, the assessee has no opportunity to meet the Revenue’s case and the proviso cannot be invoked.
Applying this to the facts, the Bombay High Court held that the Revenue had “not been able to prove that any fraud, collusion or suppression of facts is attributed to” MBIL with intent to evade payment, and that the extended period was accordingly unavailable. On that finding, the show cause notice issued on 19 December 2012 — almost two years after the transactions it targeted concluded — was time-barred. The Court characterised the Tribunal’s finding to the same effect as one arrived at “after appreciation of evidence,” a finding of fact which was “neither erroneous nor perverse,” and held that an appeal confined by Section 35G to substantial questions of law could not disturb it.
3.3 What the judgment leaves undecided
Because the limitation finding was dispositive, the Court never separately answered the Revenue’s second framed question: whether the BIFR-sanctioned appointed date of amalgamation (1 April 2010) or the later date of the Registrar of Companies’ certificate of incorporation (16 November 2011) governs when a service tax liability spanning the amalgamation crystallises for a successor entity. This is a genuinely live question in transaction and restructuring practice — schemes of arrangement routinely specify an appointed date that precedes the date of formal registration by months or years, and tax authorities frequently contend that statutory liabilities should attach only from the later, formal date. MBIL’s own submission before the Court assumed, for the purposes of argument, that the earlier appointed date governed limitation computation, without conceding the general proposition; the Revenue’s contrary position was recorded but not tested to a concluded ruling. Practitioners relying on this judgment for propositions about the effective date of amalgamation for tax purposes should therefore treat that question as open on this record, notwithstanding that the Tribunal’s own (unset-aside) finding proceeded on the appointed-date basis.
3.4 Regime scope: a legacy holding, and how far its logic travels
The provisions construed here — Section 11A of the Central Excise Act, 1944, and Sections 75 through 78 and 83 of Chapter V of the Finance Act, 1994 — remain in force, unamended, for periods predating the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax regime on 1 July 2017, and the ratio of this judgment is accordingly undiminished for the substantial volume of legacy central excise and service tax litigation still pending before High Courts and the Tribunal. The judgment does not purport to construe, and says nothing about, the CGST Act, 2017’s own extended-period provisions.
That said, the evidentiary principle at the heart of Uniworth Textiles — that a longer limitation period requires the Revenue to plead, and prove, a specific fraud or suppression allegation rather than a bare recital of statutory language — is a general proposition about burden of proof, not one intrinsically tied to the excise-era text. Courts examining notices under the CGST Act’s own fraud-triggered limitation provisions have, in other proceedings, drawn on the same line of authority. Whether that transplant succeeds is a question this judgment does not answer — it is a legacy-regime holding, and any GST-era application of its logic should be verified on its own terms rather than treated as something decided here.
4. Practical significance
For assessees and their advisers currently defending, or considering how to defend, a legacy central excise or service tax demand where the show cause notice was issued well beyond the ordinary one-year period, this judgment is a useful, current reaffirmation that the extended period turns on the specificity of the fraud or suppression averment in the notice itself, not on the Revenue’s characterisation of the underlying facts after the event. Where a notice recites the statutory language of the proviso to Section 11A without identifying which specific act or omission — fraud, collusion, wilful misstatement, or suppression, each with intent to evade — is attributed to the assessee, this judgment (and the Uniworth Textiles line it applies) gives a workable basis to challenge the notice’s timeliness at the threshold, without needing to contest the underlying classification or valuation dispute on its merits.
The consistency holding has a distinct and arguably broader practical use. Any assessee facing a departmental appeal — whether before a Tribunal, a High Court, or in a fresh adjudication — should systematically identify whether the Department has accepted a Tribunal or appellate order in favour of a similarly circumstanced counterparty (a competitor, a group company, or another assessee in the same supply chain) on materially the same facts and the same legal ground. Where such an order exists and has not itself been appealed, this judgment, and the Birla Corporation and Kaumudini Narayan Dalal line it relies on, supports an independent preliminary objection to the Department’s present appeal — one that, on this judgment’s own reasoning, can dispose of the matter without reaching the merits at all. Brand-owner and contract-manufacturing or contract-bottling arrangements of the kind at issue here remain common — not only in brewing, but across FMCG, pharmaceutical and industrial contract manufacturing — and are frequently the subject of parallel departmental proceedings against several similarly placed licensees or bottlers; this judgment is a reminder to track the fate of proceedings against comparable counterparties as a matter of course, since the Department’s own inconsistency can become the assessee’s strongest ground.
For corporate transaction teams handling amalgamations, restructurings or scheme-based mergers with pending or contingent indirect tax exposure, the unresolved question here — whether an appointed date sanctioned in a scheme of arrangement, or the later date of formal registration, governs when a successor’s tax liability for the intervening period crystallises — should be flagged as a live, unresolved point in due diligence and disclosure, rather than treated as settled by this or any single decision. Finally, for litigation strategy generally, this judgment illustrates a recurring feature of Section 35G appeals: because such appeals are confined to substantial questions of law, a Tribunal’s factual finding on limitation — even one with significant revenue at stake — is difficult to dislodge once the Tribunal has appreciated the evidence and reached a conclusion that is neither erroneous nor perverse, making the quality of the factual record built before the Tribunal, rather than the appeal itself, the decisive stage of the dispute.
5. Conclusion
Millennium Beer Industries does not break new doctrinal ground on the extended period of limitation; its value lies in a clean, current application of Uniworth Textiles’ insistence on a specific, provable fraud or suppression averment to a large, long-pending service tax demand, and in giving independent, dispositive force to the Revenue’s own inconsistency in litigating identical facts against different assessees. The judgment confirms that a show cause notice invoking the extended period must do more than recite the statutory proviso; that the Revenue’s acceptance of a Tribunal order for one assessee constrains its ability to challenge the identical order for another on the same facts; and that an appeal confined to substantial questions of law under Section 35G cannot be used to re-open a Tribunal’s considered finding of fact on limitation.
The judgment also leaves a door open rather than closing it: the effective date of a service tax liability spanning a corporate amalgamation — the appointed date under a sanctioned scheme, or the later date of formal incorporation — remains, on this record, an undecided question, available for full argument in a case where the limitation point does not dispose of the matter first. For practitioners handling legacy central excise and service tax litigation, the case is a reminder that limitation defences and consistency objections, developed early and pleaded precisely, can resolve a large-quantum dispute without ever reaching its substantive merits — and that the Revenue’s own litigating history against comparable assessees is a resource worth investigating before conceding that a demand must be fought only on its underlying merits.
Authorities
Applied by the Court
| Authority | Citation | Proposition |
|---|---|---|
| Uniworth Textiles Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise, Raipur | (2013) 9 SCC 753 | The proviso extending the limitation period (Section 11A of the Central Excise Act, 1944 / Section 28 of the Customs Act, 1962) applies only where the show cause notice contains a specific, particularised averment of fraud, collusion, wilful misstatement or suppression of fact with intent to evade duty; the burden of proving such conduct lies on the Revenue. |
| Birla Corporation Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise | (2005) 6 SCC 95 | The Revenue cannot take a different litigating stand where the facts of two cases are almost identical, particularly having taken a conscious decision to accept the position in one case. |
| Union of India v. Kaumudini Narayan Dalal | (2001) 10 SCC 231 | The Revenue cannot accept a judgment in one assessee’s case and, without just cause, challenge the correctness of an identical judgment in another assessee’s case; a court may decline to examine the correctness of the order in such circumstances. |
Quoted within the extracted portions of applied precedents (not independently invoked by this Court)
| Authority | Citation | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Aban Loyd Chiles Offshore Ltd. | Quoted within Uniworth Textiles | Supreme Court’s own earlier reasoning on the specificity required in a show cause notice to invoke the extended period, extracted within the passage from Uniworth Textiles relied upon here. |
| Collector of Central Excise v. H.M.M. Ltd. | Quoted within the Aban Loyd Chiles Offshore extract | Earlier construction of Section 11A of the Central Excise Act, 1944 requiring a show cause notice to allege which specific default within the proviso is attributed to the assessee. |
| Pepsico India Holdings Ltd. | Referred to within the quoted extract from Birla Corporation | Background reference within the Supreme Court’s own extracted reasoning in Birla Corporation; not independently discussed by this Court. |
| Pradip Ramanlal Sheth | (1993) 204 ITR 866 (Guj.), referred to within the quoted extract from Kaumudini Narayan Dalal | Background reference within the Supreme Court’s own extracted reasoning in Kaumudini Narayan Dalal; an income tax matter, not independently discussed by this Court. |
Legislation considered
| Statute | Provisions | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Central Excise Act, 1944 | Sections 11A, 35B(1), 35G | https://www.indiacode.nic.in/ |
| Finance Act, 1994 | Chapter V, Sections 75, 76, 77, 78, 83 | https://www.indiacode.nic.in/ |
| Customs Act, 1962 | Section 28 (considered by analogy through Uniworth Textiles) | https://www.indiacode.nic.in/ |
Judgment
Commissioner of Central Excise, Aurangabad (now Commissioner of Central GST and Service Tax, Aurangabad) v. M/s Millennium Beer Industries Ltd. (now amalgamated with M/s United Breweries Ltd.), Central Excise Appeal No. 1 of 2020, Neutral Citation 2026:BHC-AUG:40233-DB, High Court of Judicature at Bombay, Bench at Aurangabad (Nitin B. Suryawanshi and Abasaheb D. Shinde, JJ.), reserved 22 July 2026, pronounced 3 September 2026 — https://indiankanoon.org/doc/10016743/
FAQ
Can the Revenue invoke the extended, five-year period of limitation simply by citing the proviso to Section 11A of the Central Excise Act in a show cause notice? No. This judgment, applying Uniworth Textiles Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise, Raipur, holds that the notice must specifically aver which statutory default — fraud, collusion, wilful misstatement or suppression of fact, each with intent to evade duty — is attributed to the assessee. A bare recital of the proviso’s language, without such a particularised allegation, cannot sustain the extended period, and the burden of proving the allegation rests on the Revenue throughout.
If the Department has accepted a Tribunal order in favour of one company, can it still appeal an identical order in favour of a different, similarly placed company? Not without just cause, according to this judgment. Relying on Birla Corporation Ltd. and Kaumudini Narayan Dalal, the Bombay High Court held that where the facts of two cases are substantially identical, the Revenue’s acceptance of the Tribunal’s reasoning for one assessee bars it from challenging the same reasoning for another, and treated this “Principle of Consistency” as an independent, dispositive ground for dismissing the appeal.
Does this judgment decide whether a scheme of amalgamation’s appointed date, or the later date of the Registrar of Companies’ certificate of incorporation, governs a successor company’s tax liability? No. The Revenue raised this as a second question of law, but the Court disposed of the appeal entirely on limitation and consistency grounds and did not separately answer it. The point remains open for a case in which it is necessary to the outcome.
This article is not legal advice and does not create an attorney–client relationship. Readers should verify the certified copy of the judgment and any subsequent clarificatory orders before relying on it, and consult a qualified advocate on the facts of their matter.