NEW DELHI: : The Delhi high court quashed on Monday the 2016 income-tax notices to NDTV founders Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy and asked the department to pay Rs 1 lakh to each of them as costs for harassment.A bench of Justices Dinesh Mehta and Vinod Kumar observed that authorities subjecting Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy to reassessment proceedings for the second time, “practically for the same issue”, was arbitrary and without jurisdiction. “Initiation of reassessment proceedings in such circumstances leads to unnecessary harassment of an assessee on the one hand and gives rise to unpredictability/uncertainty, if not anarchy, on the other… The facts of the present case speak volumes as to how the proceedings are arbitrary and contrary to statutory provisions, besides being against the fundamental principles of adjudicatory process,” the HC observed, allowing the petitions by the couple.It said while no amount of cost can be treated as enough for these cases, “we cannot leave these cases without imposing any. Hence, we impose a token cost of Rs 1 lakh per case upon the respondents to be paid to each of the petitioners”. The HC also flagged how a change of an officer resulted in a change of proceedings, stressing that “merely because the new incumbents in the chair feel themselves to be wiser and they hold another opinion, which their predecessor did not or could not take, an already settled assessment cannot be unsettled and the petitioner cannot be made to face the rigmarole or harassment of assessment proceedings again and again”.The income-tax notice concerned the reassessment of the petitioners’ income for the year 2009-10 on account of certain “interest-free” loans received by them from RRPR Holding Pvt Ltd, the promoter entity of NDTV. The Roys were then shareholders and directors of RRPR.
