The Siliguri Tea Auction Centre. Picture by Diptendu Dutta

Siliguri, March 3: The weekly auction at Siliguri Tea Auction Centre (STAC) was stalled for the second consecutive week today amid uproars from buyers who demanded that proxy bidders take responsibility for the multicrore tax evasion scam.

Following buyers? protests, auction for sale number eight had to be stalled, throwing the schedule for auction nine and 10 out of gear. Over 70,000 kg of unsold tea is lying in the warehouses and several producers have already sounded a caveat that if the stalemate continues, they will be forced to sell the tea at the newly-opened Jalpaiguri tea auction centre.

?We will not allow the auction to take place as long as the STAC does not make things clear,? said Rajiv Lochan, the secretary of Siliguri Tea Traders? Association. ?The sales tax department is unnecessarily harassing buyers indiscriminately for the fault of a few dummy bidders. These bidders should be told to pay up the balance taxes.?

The commercial tax directorate recently unearthed massive tax evasions by tea traders for post-auction sale of tea. Tea traders pay one per cent tax for the auction purchase, seven per cent if the tea is sold within the state and two per cent for inter-state purchase.

?Dealers have not filed returns or maintained an account of what they did with the tea they purchased at the Siliguri tea auction centre,' M.C. Mukhopadhyay, the additional commissioner, commercial taxes, Siliguri zone had earlier alleged. ?Some dealers produced papers showing inter-state sale, but as we later found out, they were all fake,? he had said.

According to auction rules, a registered dealer can only bid for one principle buyer, other than himself, for which he has to maintain written documents. Rules in the backburner, it was ?in good faith? that bidders not only bid for more than one principle buyer, but also abstained from maintaining any written proof of the deals.

The tea auction rule book says: ?A bidder shall be liable to the broker for payment of prompt (value of goods) and sales tax (or declaration form in lieu of sales-tax payment) in case his principle buyer fails to make such payments.?

Law already against them, the buyers today demanded that the auction committee ?define in clear terms the responsibility of the bidders?.

The traders? association today filed a writ petition in the high court and the case is slated for hearing on Monday. ?We have sought clarification from the court as to who is liable for the whole tax evasion scam since the status of the proxy bidding is unclear to us. We have asked the sales tax directorate to put on hold its tax collection drive till the court verdict,? Lochan said.

The STAC tried to resume bidding in the afternoon, but with a fresh spate of protests, it had to be abandoned.

?The Sales Advisory Committee met today to discuss how to resume operations,? an STAC member said. ?The buyers have asked us to furnish the list of registered bidders, which will take us some time.?