Posted on May 27, 2016
07:24:00 PM [ bworldonline.com ]
THE Court of Tax Appeals en
banc has junked the appeal of businessman Macario Lim Gaw, Jr. to stop the
Bureau of Internal Revenue from auctioning off his properties to partially
settle his P6.52-billion tax liabilities.
In a nine-page decision
dated May 20, the CTA sitting as the full court dismissed Mr. Gaw’s petition to
reverse the First Division’s July 2014 denial of the plea to nullify the Bureau
of Internal Revenue’s (BIR) Apr. 29, 2014 auction sale.
The full court’s dismissal
was on jurisdictional ground. It cited Rule 43, section 1 of the Rules of
Court, which it said allows appeals from “judgments or final orders” of a CTA
division.
The First Division’s
resolutions that denied the bid to nullify the auction sale were “not final
orders or judgments which dispose of the case, but merely interlocutory
orders,” the en banc decision noted.
Because of this, the said
orders could not be subjected to an appeal before the CTA en banc.
Mr. Gaw was slapped with
several tax evasion complaints in 2010, for allegedly misdeclaring his property
sales as sales of “capital assets” when these were actually sales of ordinary
assets. By doing so, he paid only a 6% capital gains tax and avoiding paying a
32% income tax and a 12% value-added tax.
From 2007 to 2008, the BIR
said Mr. Gaw bought 10 properties with an aggregate amount of P4.11 billion and
sold them for P8.41 billion months later.
The businessman is the
president of Mega Packing Corp. and Macro Liquid Petroleum Gas Co., Inc.
The Department of Justice
considers Mr. Gaw’s case as one of its top 20 major cases. -- Vince Alvic
Alexis F. Nonato
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