Principal Commissioner of Customs Vs Vaibhav Agarwal (CESTAT Mumbai)
CESTAT Mumbai held that consignment of steam coal imports from Indonesia is not overvalued and the scheme of valuation does not stand in support of the manner in which the value has been sought to be substituted in the notice. Accordingly, present appeals are dismissed.
Facts- There is no travesty more horrendous and mortifying than that of an instrument of governance, chartered by empowering, and thereby particular and circumscribing, statute enacted also as earnest of sovereignty, and tempered, by its very purpose, through shared experiences of comity of nations made manifest as enablement, and thereby also particular and circumscribing, in the statute, deploying appendant machinery provisions to validate ways and means for evaluating the swathe of business transaction though overlap of mutual concern is merely peripheral. A framework that was embedded with a deeming fiction merely for integrating one of the enabling provisions within the construct of the law and to which a machinery provision has been tethered as contextual necessity to make it work has been stretched to breaking point, and, that too, by appropriation at subaltern level, beyond the design of intent in legislated enactment or even contemplated for policy formulation. And all by disaggregation and re-aggregation of the several, and mutually exclusive, elements of a valuation scheme, conceived for giving effect to the caveats in the statutory provision enabling valuation of goods, by casting doubts on contractual engagements spanning transnational jurisdictions.
