Tax officials raid at Ram Gopal Varma’s office





On Wednesday noon, at around 2 pm, Ram Gopal Varma’s office in Andheri had unexpected and unwanted guests and they were tax officials from Income tax dept. They raided the office of Ram Gopal Varma located at the Silver Arch building in Millat Nagar, Andheri and grilled the film maker for about 8 hours. They left by 10.30 pm.



Ram Gopal Varma came under suspicion after his name was not listed in the exhaustive list of 132 Bollywood celebrities who evaded tax over the past year. These 132 celebrities were issued notice by Income Tax department.



Tax officials revealed that there was no record of his production houses with the tax department. Ram Gopal claims that his offices are registered in Hyderabad. During the course of raid, the tax officials gathered that the offices of the film maker are not registered anywhere not even in Hyderabad. Ram Gopal owns two production houses with the names Dream Force Productions and Dream Force Enterprises. But both of them are unregistered.



A tax official said, “We will scrutinize each of his projects to find out the amount of service and professional tax he has evaded. Film producers are liable to pay service tax as they sell their films and their satellite rights. Varma, being a director scriptwriter as well, is also liable to pay professional tax. We are recording his statement.”



The officials further told that Ram Gopal Varma shifted his base to Hyderabad as he intended to evade taxes post 2008 as his films did poor business. But the non appearance of the director’s name in the list of 132 celebrities raised a doubt in their mind which was further confirmed by their raid at the director’s office.



A source close to Ram Gopal Varma confirmed the news of raid and said that the director cooperated with the officials.



Currently the actor is working on the sequel of ‘Satya’. The movie is called ‘Satya 2’. Ram Gopal is also active in Telugu movies. He has directed a number of Telugu movies as well. He has worked as a director, producer and screen writer. He is also directing ‘Naanthan Da’ which is a Tamil movie and will be released in this year. This year will also see him producing sequel of ‘Ab Tak Chappan’. Varma has also written his biography. His book was released in 2010 in Hyderabad.