The chairman of the National Board of Revenue (NBR), Ghulam Hossain, Wednesday said the property of MA Mannan, the BNP-backed Gazipur mayoral candidate, could be confiscated for evading income tax worth about Tk2.4m.
“We have frozen his bank account as per the legal procedure, and would seize his property, if needed,” the revenue chief said at a press conference at the NBR headquarters. “If his account does not contain enough money to cover the amount he owes in tax, we would seize his assets,” he added.
According to the revenue authority, Mannan owes Tk2,439,681 in unpaid taxes for the 2007-08 fiscal year as the managing director of Capital Property Development (pvt) Ltd.
Hossain also said the NBR move had nothing to do with the Gazipur city elections, scheduled for Saturday.
“The move has no connection with the upcoming elections. He has not paid due taxes for many years. Since a case takes six to seven years to develop, the issue has been raised now. The order for freezing his bank account was given earlier, but it was carried out on June 5,” he said.
However, bank documents show that Mannan’s account at Mercantile Bank’s Gulshan branch was blocked on June 13, under section 143 of the Income Tax Ordinance, 1984.
“We served notices to him several times, but when he did not pay the tax, we filed a case in FY 2007-08 for evading tax worth Tk24 lakh. He appealed to the court and lost, but he has not paid the dues yet,” Hossain said.
Pointing to an “information gap,” Hossain said: “He has been operating his tax files in Gazipur since last year. Before that, his files were operated from Circle 5, Dhaka. According to the system, if anyone wants to change his/her tax file location, he/she has to notify the tax office, which he did not do.”
The NBR head also said that the revenue body has frozen many bank accounts to achieve the revenue target for the last fiscal year 2012-13.
“We have frozen many bank accounts of politicians, businessmen and government officials to collect income taxes to reach the revenue target for last fiscal year,” Hossain said.