Union Budget

Even as the two rival national political parties played April Fool of their actual political rivalries on 1 April by appealing together in the Supreme Court, a common judgment passed against them by the Delhi high court, The Wire has exposed a little-known fact, which promises to excel the incredible phenomenon of these two rival parties coming together on a common platform to fight a common enemy.

The Union Budget has withdrawn the service tax exemption of senior advocates providing services to other advocates or law firms, effectively increasing the cost of instructing senior counsel by 14 per cent.

Economic Laws Practice (ELP) has analysed the Union budget highlights.[Download PDF]

India will have a comprehensive bankruptcy code making it easier for entrepreneurs to exit unviable ventures on the lines prevailing in the US, towards improving the ease of doing business, Finance Minister Arun Jaitely said Saturday.

“Bankruptcy law reform, that brings about legal certainty and speed, has been identified as a key priority for improving the ease of doing business,” Jaitley told the Lok Sabha while presenting the NDA government’s first full budget.

“We will bring a comprehensive Bankruptcy Code in fiscal 2015-16, that will meet global standards and provide necessary judicial capacity,” he added.

The new code will essentially help banks recover dues in case promoters default.

It will replace the Sick Industrial Companies Act (SICA) as well as the Board for Industrial and Finance reconstruction (BIFR) Act which have failed in achieving the objective of bankruptcy law reform, the finance minister said.

A recent celebrated case of corporate default is that of the grounded Kingfisher Airlines, which owes over Rs.7,000 crore to a consortium of banks. The airlines owes the state-run State Bank of India Rs.2,000 crore, while the bank took possession of Kingfisher House in Mumbai earlier this month in a bid to recover some part of its money.

The union budget for 2015-16 has earmarked Rs.806.2 crore for the development of judicial infrastructure in states and union territories, the National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms and the administration of justice.

It has earmarked Rs.212.19 crore for the mission under the plan head which is up by Rs.124.99 crore compared to the Rs.87.30 crore allocated in 2014-15.

The national justice mission was set up in 2011 to improve a variety of issues relating to the judiciary to reduce pendency and arrears and increase access to justice.

But the catch is that in 2014-15, the government had revised and scaled down the expenditure to just Rs.5.69 crore of the allocated plan expenditure of Rs.89.30 crore for the mission.

However, there is a steep decline in the government allocation for the computerization of district and the subordinate courts with the allocation of just Rs.2 crore.

In 2014-15, the total allocation for computerization was Rs.58 crore which was scaled down to Rs.29.87 crore in the revised budget estimates.

The grant in aid to the states for the development of judicial infrastructure is earmarked at Rs.443.69 crore which is nearly half of Rs.842.40 crore allocated in the revised budget estimates in 2014-15.

Similarly grant in aid for the UTs is Rs.63 crore against the Rs.60 crore allocated in previous fiscal.

The Supreme Court has been allocated Rs.562.99 crore for plan expenditure which is Rs.373.01 crore less than what was allocated under the plan head in the 2014-15 budget.

Update 1 March: The Union Budget 2013-2014, announced by finance minister P Chidambaram yesterday, glossed over investor interests, didn’t touch the Direct Tax Code, and left GAAR mostly unchanged. We bring you a selection of law firm reactions to the Finance Bill 2013 we've received via email.

A corollary of the Rule of Law is that legislation with retrospective effect is highly dubious, argues Kian Ganz. The latest budget proposals to tax offshore transactions going back to 1962, is a worrying sign of the kind of country India wants to be.

Breaking: Fees earned by lawyers in courts or tribunals will not be subject to service tax under the Union Budget, which expanded the overall scope of service tax to everything except for a few exceptions.

The Union Budget’s plan to tax Vodafone’s Indian Hutch takeover and similar transactions retrospectively going back to 1962 is unconstitutional and would not pass scrutiny of the courts, said Dutt Menon Dunmorrsett Mumbai-based partner Fereshte Sethna, who represented Vodafone in its Rs 11 crore ($2.4bn) dispute with the tax office in the Mumbai High Court and the Supreme Court.

Live: The Budget 2012 speech is kicking off at 11am and Legally India will blog it live. What do you think it holds for lawyers and clients? Hike service tax for lawyers or abolish it? Increase FDI? Vodafone, round 27? DTC news? Tinker with near-unusable LLPs? Massive tax benefits for all? Damp squib? Share your thoughts and follow our live blog.

The Government is reportedly re-examining the 2011 Finance Bill’s proposal to charge service tax on an accruals basis, which would force law firms to pay service tax as soon as they bill a client rather than when the cash is actually received.

Either the Indian Government is short of cash, is in full GST mode or it just does not like lawyers very much.

Exclusive: Law firms’ litigation associates could find themselves liable to have to charge service tax to their law firms and account for it to the Revenue under the Budget’s new service tax rules that apply to individuals representing businesses in courts or tribunals.

Exclusive: Society of Indian Law Firms (SILF) chairman Lalit Bhasin has condemned the expanded service tax rules on law firms, saying that SILF and other law firms would file a new writ petition against the changes while the existing writ petition remained pending in the Bombay High Court.

Breaking: The Union Budget has widened contentious law firm service tax to apply to court-based, tribunal and arbitration advice by lawyers and has been further expanded to include advice by law firms to individuals too.

11:00am The Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s 2011 India Union budget has just started after having been approved by cabinet. This blog will begin in earnest once the budget is over and we can get reactions from lawyers. In the meantime, IBN Live has a nice live blog page with a fast video and text updates. Please post your comments and thoughts on the budget below in the meantime.

Today's 2010-11 Union Budget has not directly affected law firms although it could have knock-on effects in several practice areas and save individual junior lawyers almost 30 per cent of tax.

This was an exciting week not just for India's business media but also for tax lawyers, who will no doubt spend the long and colourful Holi weekend getting to grips with the changes in the 2010-11 Budget.

Lawyers and corporates have generally welcomed the Budget's safe smorgasbord of changes, which could increase lawyers' work, despite heavy lobbying efforts having given no respite to law firms on service tax. But it is also very unlikely there will be a repeat of last year when litigators went on strike over the service tax imposed on their law firm brothers and sisters.