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Taxmen to avoid coercion to recover MAT dues: CBDT
New Delhi: On the vexed issue of minimum alternate tax (MAT), the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) said on Tuesday that its officers will avoid coercive methods to recover dues on capital gains made by foreign investors.
The board will wait for a Supreme Court verdict on the issue, it said.
“If order (on levying of MAT on FIIs) is in appeal, then we can certainly tell our assessing officer (that) please don’t take it further; don’t agitate it further and this is exactly what we did in Shell and Vodafone tax cases,” CBDT chairperson Anita Kapur told reporters here.
“Shell and Vodafone cases went against us and once we accepted that judgment, we told our officers please don’t do future assessments and please don’t further agitate these in appeals,” she said.
She also said that she was not in a position now to talk about the Justice A.P. Shah-led committee going into the applicability of MAT on foreign institutional investors (FIIs) for previous years.
“I cannot anticipate what the Shah panel will do. The Commission has fixed a schedule for hearing out all the stakeholders. Let’s see how things proceed,” Kapur said.
“The merits of the issue can also be decided by the Supreme Court,” she added.
CBDT had, last month, said it will not raise any new demands for payments, and will take no coercive action to pursue claims that have already been filed under MAT.
The Income Tax department had sent notices to 68 FIIs demanding Rs.602.83 crore as MAT dues of previous years, and these FIIs, in turn, moved court challenging the demand.
The Shah committee will examine MAT notices for the period before April 1, 2015, and has been requested to give its recommendations expeditiously.
In the 2015-16 Budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had exempted FIIs from paying MAT with effect from April.
Even after Jaitley’s announcement on exempting FIIs from paying MAT on capital gains earned by them, the Income Tax department sent notice to at least 90 foreign portfolio investors.
With the uncertainty created by MAT, foreign investors sold Indian shares and bonds of around $630 million on May 6, marking the biggest single-day sale since January 2014.
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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