New Delhi [India], January 14 (ANI): Directorate General of GST Intelligence has busted a Kolkata-based syndicate involving fake invoices worth rupees 4.500 crores of 636 fake firms and arrested a man related to the matter, the DGGI officials said in a statement on Friday.

According to the statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs, the search was conducted on January 6 at premises in Delhi.

During the search, it was found that the proprietor was engaged in providing services of "Cloud Storage" on his servers to various customers for maintaining their financial accounts.

On scrutiny of one of the suspicious servers, details of certain firms were found in tally data. It was informed by the proprietor that this tally data was being maintained by one syndicate based in Kolkata.

The address details of these persons were obtained from the proprietor and then searches were conducted at various premises in Kolkata on January 1.

As per the statement, a huge amount of incriminating documents including mobiles phones, various checkbooks, stamps of various firms, and SIM cards have been recovered during the search.

On analysis of electronic devices, documents, mobiles, and e-mail of the culprits, it has been found that they were remotely maintaining data on the server found at the premises in the national capital.

Scrutiny of Tally data has shown that there are 636 firms being operated by this syndicate. The mastermind of the syndicate has accepted that they have issued only invoices in these firms and not supplied any goods against them. They have issued invoices involving the taxable value of approximately. Rs. 4,521 crore having ITC implication of around 741 crores.

"During the course of the investigation, GST amounting to Rs 4.52 crore has been got deposited by reversal of ITC available in the ITC ledger of these firms. Further, till now around Rs 7 crore lying in various bank accounts of these firms has been frozen. The mastermind behind the whole racket has been arrested on January 13," the DGGI said in a statement.

Further investigation in underway. (ANI)