Senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi was slapped with an Income Tax penalty of Rs 56.67 crore while his three-year “declared professional income” was increased by Rs 91.95 crore by a Settlement Commission order, which was stayed on 11 September by the Jodhpur high court, reported the Indian Express.

The Income Tax department and Commission questioned Singhvi’s claim of having spent Rs 5 crore on buying laptops for 14 staff or juniors, which would have been equivalent to 1,250 laptops costing Rs 40,000 each, according to the Commission.

Singhvi told the Express that many laptops were more expensive than the Commission assumed, and that many more juniors than just 14 had “come and gone” in three years.

The Commission also held that a claimed expense of Rs 35.98 crore on buying solar panels for Singhvi’s company was “mainly intended at tax evasion by inflating the cost of the panels”, as the vendor apparently admitted that it received only Rs 21 crore from Singhvi, with Rs 10 crore repaid to Singvi as a loan to his sons.

Singhvi told the Express that he was not given a chance to cross-examine that vendor, whose statement was therefore inadmissable, and that depreciation was validly claimed for the panels.

Singhvi had also claimed that in 2012 termites had destroyed expense records kept at his chartered accountants’ office, but the Commission found that a number of his expense claims were non-verifiable, as it was unable to confirm the recipients of 37 out of 91 cheque payments.

In his defence, Singhvi told the Express that he was the “highest or in some years, the second or third highest tax-payer for the last 20 years in my category (legal practitioners)”, and that he had not been given “fundamental natural natural justice”, despite his having approached the Commission on his own, which had now turned it into a “cat and mouse game”.

The Commission also questioned how Singhvi’s declared legal practice only generated 55 per cent of his income, whereas other senior counsel declared that 90 to 95 per cent of their income came from their work as lawyers.