THE Justice department is giving the Bureau of Internal Revenue the opportunity to refute the claims of the owner and officials of the tobacco firm Mighty Corp. that they could not be held liable for tax evasion arising from the company’s alleged use of counterfeit excise stamps on its products.
The department’s prosecutors gave the BIR until May 18 to reply to the counter-affidavits of Mighty Corp.’s owner and officials.
The accused have denied the charges against them and are seeking the dismissal of the P9.56-billion tax-evasion case filed against them.
The department cleared the BIR to answer Mighty Corp.’s charges after the company’s executives led by its owner and corporate assistant secretary Alex Wongchuking again appeared on Thursday before the department’s prosecutors to deny the P9.56-billion tax-evasion charges filed against them by the BIR.
The prosecutors barred the reporters from covering the hearing.
But Senior Associate State Prosecutor Maria Lourdes Uy told reporters after the hearing that they received the counter-affidavit of the tobacco firm’s president, retired general Edilberto Adan.
“For today it was Adan’s,” Uy said.
The BIR filed the P9.56-billion tax-evasion charges on March 22 against the owners and officials of Mighty Corp. including Wongchuking, Adan, executive vice president Oscar Barrientos and treasurer Ernesto Victa.
And on May 9 the BIR slapped Mighty Corp. with a P26.93-billion tax-evasion case, bringing Mighty Corp.’s alleged total tax liability to P36.49 billion”•the largest tax-evasion case under the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte.
Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II had said his department was considering the consolidation of the two tax-evasion complaints against Mighty Corp.
In the second complaint, the BIR accused Mighty Corp.’s executives of violating the National Internal Revenue Code for unlawful possession of articles subject to excise tax without payment of the tax and for possessing false, counterfeit, restored or altered stamps.
The new complaint stemmed from the raid conducted by Internal Revenue and Customs officials on March 24 on the tobacco firm’s warehouses in Bulacan that resulted in the discovery of 536,000 cigarette packs in 1,072 master cases with fake stamps.
The 536,000 cigarette packs were part of the 81,591,500 packs contained in 163,183 master cases found in the warehouses.
The first tax evasion case filed by the BIR against Mighty Corp. in March involved the master cases of cigarettes worth P2.3 billion bearing fake tax stamps that were seized from the firm’s warehouse in San Simon Industrial Park in Pampanga.