Insights & Analysis
A Claim Never Filed Is a Claim Extinguished: Delhi High Court Quashes a Customs Duty Demand the Department Never Placed Before the Resolution Professional
The goods were imported in 2023, the insolvency process ran its course in 2024 and 2025, and the customs show-cause notice arrived only after the resolution plan had already been approved. The Delhi High Court held that a customs demand for duty, interest and penalty on a pre-CIRP import cannot outlive a resolution plan the department never bothered to file a claim in — however live the underlying adjudication otherwise remained.
14 min readA Department That Once Agreed With You Cannot Later Call You a Suppressor: Delhi High Court Sets Aside Service Tax Penalty on Construction Services to Government Hospitals and Educational Institutions
Two officers of the Service Tax Department told the audit wing, in writing, that a construction consultant's work for government hospitals and colleges was not taxable. Nineteen years and one appeal later, the Delhi High Court held that the Department could not turn around and call the same conduct wilful suppression warranting penalty, even after upholding the underlying demand for the last nine months of a five-year dispute.
13 min readAn Assigned NBFC Loan Becomes a SARFAESI Debt the Moment a Bank Takes It Over, Supreme Court Holds
Three home and business borrowers argued that a debt born outside SARFAESI's reach cannot be dragged into it later just because a bank buys the loan. The Supreme Court disagreed, and the ruling reaches every residential flat standing behind an assigned NBFC mortgage.
13 min readDelay Is Not Default: Supreme Court Holds a Carrier Who Deposits Foreign Travel Tax Late Cannot Be Penalised as One Who Failed to Pay It
An airline deposited Foreign Travel Tax late in six instances, once by 63 days, and was hit with a penalty of over Rs. 71 lakh — nearly 600 times the amount first imposed before its own appeal triggered a remand. The Supreme Court set the penalty aside, holding that 'failure to pay' cannot be equated with delay, and that customs officers retain discretion not to impose a penalty even where a statutory minimum is prescribed.
14 min readNo HUF, No Valid Will: Delhi High Court Untangles a Three-Generation Family Property Dispute
A family fought for fourteen years over a Delhi house, advancing three overlapping property claims at once — an HUF, a Will, a Gift Deed. The Delhi High Court found each unravelled the moment it was actually tested against the documents and the witnesses.
13 min readEighty Percent Sugar, No Marketability Defence: CESTAT Holds Captively Consumed Sugar Syrup Dutiable Even Though the Biscuits It Went Into Were Exempt
A biscuit manufacturer argued its captively consumed sugar syrup, made to a proprietary formula and never sold, was not 'goods' at all. Thirteen years after the show cause notice, CESTAT Ahmedabad disagreed, applying the Supreme Court's marketability test and a bright-line sugar-content threshold from tribunal precedent, while remanding to let the company claim Cenvat credit on the inputs consumed.
14 min readNo Membership, No Plot: Supreme Court Closes a Seven-Decade Cooperative Housing Society Allotment Dispute
A claim to a cooperative society plot that began in 1952 has finally ended, seventy-four years and one prior Supreme Court round later — decided not on the equities of land allotment but on how far a writ court may go in re-examining a tribunal's finding of fact.
14 min readEarnest Money Forfeited, Part-Payment Refunded: Delhi High Court Draws the Line in a Failed Agreement to Sell
A buyer paid Rs. 17.5 lakh under an Agreement to Sell, then defaulted. The seller kept it all. The Delhi High Court had to work out how much of that money was truly earnest money — and how much was simply price paid too early.
14 min readDetention Is Not Seizure: Gujarat High Court Says Customs Cannot Sidestep the Section 110(2) Limitation Clock by Simply Not Passing an Order
A Toyota Land Cruiser sat in DRI custody for over a year on the strength of nothing more than a panchnama, while the department waited out the writ petition before finally issuing a seizure order — and then a show-cause notice timed to fall just inside the limitation period it measured from that late order. The Gujarat High Court was not persuaded: detention without a recorded order under Section 110 is not seizure, the limitation clock does not wait on the department's convenience, and the DRI's account of why it had not acted sooner did not survive the Court's own record.
13 min read