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2022 (11) TMI 636 - AT - CustomsSmuggling - Gold/studded jewellery - baggage rules - discharge of burden to prove - preponderance of probability - section 123 of Customs Act, 1962 - whether a person who was intercepted once with such goods for proceedings under the regular law and whose suggested facilitation of unaccounted stock of such goods at the premises of another is intended to be penalized by recourse to this special provision in relation to another set of such goods alleged to have been smuggled even earlier? HELD THAT:- The studded jewellery impugned in the appeal were not intercepted in a customs area; it is also not in doubt that it was not an interruption of a transaction of the appellants that commenced these proceedings. Under the normal procedure of confiscation under the statute, it would be necessary to present evidence, even if not necessarily direct, of the impugned goods having been in the baggage of Mrs Vihari Sheth during one or more of her inbound travels to invoke the penal provisions against the three appellants; section 123 of Customs Act, 1962 obviates that in relation to goods considered by the State as warranting such recourse. The scope for invoking of section 123 of Customs Act, 1962 must now be turned to. Section 123 of Customs Act, 1962 is all about responsibility for discharging onus of licit possession and, in terms of the law as it stands today, it is cast on the person from whom the suspectedly smuggled goods were seized and, in the event of any such assertion, on the person claiming ownership. It is on record that the impugned goods were neither seized from any, or all, of the appellants and nor have any of them claimed to be the owner; the first is incontrovertible fact and the second is not one that can be foisted for reason of an established past, or probability of a future, incident of offence - the goods, nonetheless, are ‘studded jewellery’ which is a description, in common parlance, of precious stones set in articles of precious metals, most commonly gold, and to those not familiar with the chronological mutation of section 123(2) of Customs Act, 1962 coverage of the impugned goods therein may even be acceptable. In the absence of recourse to section 123 of Customs Act, 1962, the linkage of the several inferences and suppositions must be established with material and/or oral evidence to be compliant with normative requirement of customs officials having to establish that one or the other reasons for confiscation under section 111 of Customs Act, 1962 are manifest. The essential requirement of evidencing association with goods liable for confiscation has not been discharged. Licit possession in the course of domestic transaction having been satisfactorily furnished, without being controverted by the lower authorities, on the part of owners of the impugned goods, the arbitrary arrogation of empowerment to subject the sellers to the presumption of having been in possession of ‘smuggled goods’ sans authority of law to do so deprives the finding of liability to penalty under section 112 of Customs Act, 1962 of legal sanctity. Without evincing illicit trafficking, in the form in which it was recovered from customers, from outside the country, even by the stretched framework of preponderance of probability, there is no onus on the appellants to establish that the conjectures entertained by customs authorities are incorrect. Appeal allowed.
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