NEW DELHI: The Income Tax department suspects possible tax evasion by defaulters of the National Spot Exchange Ltd (NSEL) as it has found that stocks projected by most of them are forged and over-reported, sources said.

The department, on August 22, had conducted nation-wide searches on the business premises of about two dozen members of the NSEL.

"Stocks shown in the cases of defaulters on record in NSEL-accredited godowns is found to be non-existent or short in maximum number of cases," sources said.

Most of the bill-books, accounts and ledgers of these store houses, sources said, have been found to be forged and under-reported which is a clear case of tax evasion.

The I-T department will now issues summons for production of additional documents to these entities soon as further probe is on, they said.

The department suspects the account books were fudged to dodge the tax net and present a fake picture of activities at these business entities, sources said.

The I-T searches were conducted in cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Nagpur, Jaipur and few other locations.

NSEL, promoted by Jignesh Shah-headed FTIL, is facing the problem of settling Rs 5,600 crore dues to 148 members/brokers, representing 13,000 investor clients, after it suspended trade on July 31 on the government direction.

The bourse managed to collect only Rs 8.50 crore till Friday - the last day for pay-in, against the pay-out of Rs 174.72 crore to be made on Tuesday.

For the first settlement (August 20), the Exchange could settle only Rs 92.12 crore out of the scheduled of Rs 174.72 crore payment it had committed to FMC. There was a shortfall of around Rs 82 crore.

The spot commodity bourse had already declared nine members (buyers) who failed to pay their dues on the first day of settlement on August 20 as 'defaulters', following directives from the commodity market regulator FMC.

These defaulters include ARK Imports Pvt Ltd, Moil Overseas Foods Ltd, Lotus Refineries Pvt Ltd, N K Proteins Ltd and Vimladevi Agrotech Ltd.

NSEL has also sacked its Managing Director and CEO Anjani Sinha and six other top executives in the wake of these developments.

PTI