2013 (1) TMI 343 - SUPREME COURT

Exemption from payment of income tax on interest earned - fixed deposits kept with certain banks which were corporate members of the assessee club - claim of invoking doctrine of mutuality - appellant is an unincorporated Association of Persons (AOP) - claim rejected on lack of identity between the contributors and the participators to the fund - High Court allowed the appeal of revenue - Held that:- The arrangement lacks a complete identity between the contributors and participators. Till the stage of generation of surplus funds, the setup resembled that of a mutuality, the flow of money, to and fro, was maintained within the closed circuit formed by the banks and the club, and to that extent, nobody who was not privy to this mutuality, benefited from the arrangement. However, as soon as these funds were placed in fixed deposits with banks, the closed flow of funds between the banks and the club suffered from deflections due to exposure to commercial banking operations. During the course of their banking business, the member banks used such deposits to advance loans to their clients. Hence, in the present case, with the funds of the mutuality, member banks engaged in commercial operations with third parties outside of the mutuality, rupturing the ‘privity of mutuality’, and consequently, violating the one to one identity between the contributors and participators as mandated by the first condition. Thus, in the case before us the first condition for a claim of mutuality is not satisfied.

As the second condition demands that to claim an exemption from tax on the principle of mutuality, treatment of the excess funds must be in furtherance of the object of the club, which is not the case here. The surplus funds were not used for any specific service, infrastructure, maintenance or for any other direct benefit for the member of the club.

The facts at hand also fail to satisfy the third condition of the mutuality principle i.e. the impossibility that contributors should derive profits from contributions made by themselves to a fund which could only be expended or returned to themselves. As in the present case, the funds do return to the club. However, before that, they are expended on non- members i.e. the clients of the bank. Banks generate revenue by paying a lower rate of interest to club-assessee, that makes deposits with them, and then loan out the deposited amounts at a higher rate of interest to third parties. This loaning out of funds of the club by banks to outsiders for commercial reasons, snaps the link of mutuality and thus, breaches the third condition.

There is nothing on record which shows that the banks made separate and special provisions for the funds that came from the club, or that they did not loan them out. Therefore, clearly, the club did not give, or get, the treatment a club gets from its members, the interaction between them clearly reflected one between a bank and its client. This directly contravenes the third condition - the amount of interest earned by the assessee from the afore-noted four banks will not fall within the ambit of the mutuality principle and will therefore, be exigible to Income-Tax in the hands of the assessee-club.