Bombay HC Fines Anil Ambani Rs. 25,000 for Urgent Hearing Request on Tax Notice

The Bombay High Court has fined industrialist Anil Ambani Rs. 25,000 for asking for an urgent hearing of his petition against a notice from the Income Tax Department issued in April 2022. The court said there was no real urgency and called it an “artificial urgency.”

A division bench of Justices M. S. Sonak and Jitendra Jain said that urgent hearings could not be requested by creating a false sense of urgency.

The bench also said that the petition was only against a show cause notice in its order dated March 27. A copy of the order was shared on Wednesday (April 2).

The bench rejected Anil Ambani’s request for an urgent hearing of his petition and ordered him to pay Rs. 25,000 as a penalty. This amount must be paid to the Tata Memorial Hospital within two weeks.

When the petition came up during its regular schedule on Tuesday (April 1), Ambani’s lawyer, Rafiq Dada, informed the court that on March 27, the Income Tax department had already passed its order for the assessment year in question.

He then requested to withdraw the petition, also confirming that the Rs. 25,000 penalty had already been paid.

The bench accepted his statement and officially closed the matter, marking the petition as withdrawn.