Case Law Details
Commissioner of Central Tax Vs Singtel Global India Pvt Ltd (Delhi High Court)
Delhi High Court held that telecommunication-company, providing telecommunication and ancillary support services to company based in Singapore on its own cannot be qualified as ‘intermediary service’ as they have entered into separate contracts with service providers in India.
Facts- SGIPL (respondent) which is a company based in India, being engaged in providing global telecommunication and ancillary support services, and it is claimed that part of its services is also exported. It entered into an agreement dated 14 July 2011 with SingTel, which is a licensed telecommunications service provider in Singapore. The aforesaid agreement envisaged SGIPL providing necessary infrastructure in India so as to enable SingTel to facilitate seamless global telecommunication services to its customers based in Singapore and other foreign territories.
The Plea of the appellant (department) was that that SGIPL merely procures services from other service providers in India viz., Airtel, Vodafone, Tata, Reliance etc. and supplies the same to Singtel without any alteration; and that SGIPL does not provide the aforesaid services of telecommunications “on their own account” and thus fall within the definition of “intermediary services‟ on a conjoint reading of Rule 6A(1)(d) of the Services Tax Rules 8 read with Rule 9(C) of the POPS Rules.
Per contra, SGIPL contends that the place of provision of services would be considered as per the location of the recipient of services by virtue of Rule 3 of the ST Rules, which is outside India, and that it is not an “intermediary”.
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