Constitution Art. 20(1)

Constitution Art. 20(1) — the law in short

What the courts have decided on section Constitution Art. 20(1), in one screen. Read this first; open an entry when you need the facts, the reasoning and the source.

• Arvind Balkrishna Gogte v Income Tax Department High CourtHelps taxpayerNo later treatment found
  My foreign company was struck off and the bank account closed years before the Black Money Act commenced. Can they still prosecute me for it?
  Not on this authority. The Karnataka High Court quashed eight complaints under ss.50 and 52 of the Black Money Act where the foreign company had been struck off and the Singapore account closed in 2010, holding that the deeming fiction in s.72(c) cannot be stretched to found criminal liability for conduct that preceded the Act. Article 20(1) bars conviction under a law not actually in force when the act was done, and a statutory deeming that the asset was acquired in the year of the s.10 notice does not supply that.
• Nexus Feeds Ltd v ACIT High CourtHelps taxpayerNo later treatment found
  The transaction the Department calls benami was done in 2011. Can it use the 2016 definitions against me?
  No, on this judgment. The Telangana High Court held that ss.2(9)(A) and 2(9)(C) are substantive, offence-creating provisions and not machinery provisions, that the 2016 Amendment Act was brought into force on 1 November 2016 by the notification of 25 October 2016 with nothing to give it effect from an earlier date, and that applying those definitions to a transaction of December 2011 would offend Article 20(1). All the writ petitions were allowed.
• Niharika Jain v Union of India High CourtCuts both waysUnder appeal
  The property was bought years before November 2016 and the benami notice came after. Can the amended Act reach back?
  This is the writ batch in which the Rajasthan High Court framed that question directly - whether the Benami Amendment Act 2016 applies retrospectively - after a search under s.132 threw up show-cause notices under s.24(1) and provisional attachments under s.24(3) for pre-amendment land purchases. The judgment runs to 160 pages and the concluding part could not be reached in the copy available; what can be established from the document is the framing of the issue at para 19 and the rival cases on either side.

Listed strongest first: Supreme Court, then High Court, then Tribunal, then CBDT. Nothing here has yet been read in full by a chartered accountant — open an entry to see where it came from.