Actor-director S.J. Suryah withdraws plea to discharge him from income tax evasion cases

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The Madras High Court on Friday (September 18, 2026) dismissed as withdrawn film actor-director S.J. Suryah’s plea to discharge him from criminal prosecution initiated by the Income Tax (I-T) Department for having allegedly attempted to evade tax by not filing his returns within the stipulated time for six assessment years between 2002-03 and 2009-10.

Justice Sunder Mohan permitted the petitioner’s counsel to withdraw all six criminal revision petitions filed against the refusal of the Special Court for Economic Offences at Egmore in Chennai to discharge the petitioner from the criminal cases. The actor’s counsel chose to withdraw the revision petitions as the judge was not inclined to entertain them.

Justice Mohan found that Mr. Suryah, in 2015, filed a batch of six petitions before the High Court to quash the complaints lodged by the Income Tax Department before the special court, but Justice G. Chandrasekharan (since retired) had dismissed all of them on May 26, 2022. The Supreme Court, too, had refused to interfere with that order, which had attained finality.

Concurring with I-T Department Special Public Prosecutor (SPP) N. Sheela that the present plea for discharge was filed on identical grounds, which had already been rejected by the High Court in 2022, the judge said that he was not in favour of entertaining the present revision plea and that the petitioner would have to necessarily face trial in all six cases.

Mr. Suryah’s primary ground for seeking discharge was that the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) had set aside the assessment orders passed against him by the assessing officer and hence, he could not be forced to undergo the rigour of trial when he was not liable to pay any pending tax, penalty, or interest that could be chargeable or imposable under the Income Tax Act, 1961.

On the other hand, Ms. Sheela contended that the ITAT had set aside the assessment orders solely on a technical ground that the assessments were time-barred. Since the ITAT had not gone into the merits of the matter, there shall not be any bar for criminal prosecution, especially when the alleged violations committed by the petitioner had come to light only pursuant to a search carried out by the I-T sleuths, she said.

The SPP relied upon Supreme Court’s 2011 judgment in Radheshyam Kejriwal versus State of West Bengal to buttress her submission that adjudication proceedings and criminal prosecution were independent of each other and that exoneration from the adjudication proceedings on technical grounds would not be a bar to continue the criminal prosecution against an assessee.

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