Palak Shah

Mumbai, July 7Late Harshad Mehta, the original big bull of Indian stock markets, is back in the news. Nearly 21 years after Mehta’s death due to heart attack in a Mumbai prison, his wife Jyoti Mehta has broken her silence.

In a recently launched website, Jyoti has said that she and her family have managed to win 1,200 large legal cases in various judicial forums related to the 1992 scam trial.

Further, she has claimed that her family has been harassed by the income-tax department and the government-appointed custodian for nearly three decades and that Mehta died of medical negligence, as jail authorities denied him treatment for nearly four hours.

Jyoti has revealed that it was Mehta’s controversial meeting with the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and revelations by her husband that changed their lives. She has provided the details of their legal battle on the website.

Mehta was infamously known for his involvement in the 1992 securities scam and labelled the chief conspirator for a mega-crore bank swindle.

However, Mehta’s wife has now said that the income-tax department made claims against their family, which was 300 times their actual income.

“In these 20 years, our family has observed silence and completely stayed away from the media by not making a single statement. Punishment was meted out to us by the authorities only because we are related to Harshad.

The proximate cause was revelations Harshad was compelled to make in 1993 about his meeting with Prime Minister Narasimha Rao.”

“After Harshad’s demise and suffering three rounds of illegal assessments, we have already won more than 1,200 large cases and brought down the illegal demands from ₹30,000 crore to ₹4,000 crore, and also secured refunds to the custodian of ₹814.33 crore and further refunds of about ₹5,500 crore are already overdue and not being made by the IT department,” she wrote in a website that was launched recently by her family.

Mehta has further claimed that when the balance appeals are heard, the claims of revenue are expected to fall to about ₹200 crore and will entail further refunds. “Thus, we have thwarted the plan of the I-T department and Custodian to usurp ₹3,285.46 crore released to them by completely paralysing our organisation and hurting our ability to defend ourselves though at one point after Harshad’s demise this plan had already succeeded. In the process, irreparable loss of ₹20,677.28 crore is already suffered by us,” she said.

“After reports of likely investigation against Harshad by CBI, we decided to buy peace with the department and on June 2, 1992, made a declaration of income u/s 132(4) of the I-T Act for ₹100 crore, duly clarifying that no incomes were earned outside of books of accounts and this was the highest-ever declaration of income till that date. The I-T department was happy with this declaration as it was reportedly higher than their provisional assessments of income. We made the declaration even though our business had come to a halt,” she said.

She says that the I-T department acted with vengeance, and between 1993 and 1996 assessed abnormally-high incomes in case of the Mehta family, which on the face of it could not have been earned by any of them as the incomes were assessed more than 100-300 times of the actual taxable incomes.

Jail authorities neglected his complaint for four hours after he suffered the first heart attack at around 7 p.m. The jail doctors attended on him, but did not have medicine for heart attack. At 11 p.m., he was made to walk for a long distance to Thane hospital, where he succumbed in a wheelchair and no post-mortem was carried out or report provided.