KARACHI, Jan 5: The Supreme Court has suspended operation of the impugned judgment of the Sindh High Court which involved the question of duty to the tune of over Rs580 million on methanol and whether it should be treated as liquor or not.
The Supreme Court division bench which granted leave to appeal comprised Justice Syed Deedar Husain Shah and Justice Hamid Ali Mirza.
The Sindh government, through the secretary excise & taxation department and others, had filed a petition with the Supreme Court against numerous commercial concerns, questioning the judgment of the SHC, whereby the excise department had been deprived of two sums of excise duties to the tune of Rs580 million each, for which the commercial concerns had furnished few bank guarantees to the satisfaction of the Nazir of the court.
However the Supreme Court ordered suspension of that order till the disposal of the appeals.
Justice Mirza said the civil petitions for leave to appeal were directed against a common judgment dated 12. 6. 2001 in CP Nos D-1406, D-1408, D-1412, D-1407, D-1410, D-1411 of 1996, D-76, D-157 of 2000, D-1409 of 1996 and D-183 of 2000, respectively, passed by a division bench of the High Court of Sindh whereby all the petitions were allowed.
The contention of additional advocate-general Suleman Habibullah for the petitioners was that the SHC had erred in law in holding that the methanol, declared to be liquor as per notification dated 18. 3. 1972, could not be treated as such because of the rescinding notification dated 4th September 1974, though the latter notification was also rescinded by a notification dated 17. 12. 1974. It was done because fresh notification for declaring methanol to be liquor was specifically not issued by the petitioners in view of sections 4 and 6 of the Sindh General Clauses Act of 1956, which provisions in fact applied to the repealing of enactment, not notification.
He has placed reliance upon Sargodha Bhera Bus Service Limited and others Vs the Province of West Pakistan and another (PLD 1959 SC (Pak) (127) and had also referred to definition of enactment as given in the Black’s Law Dictionary.
The Supreme Court held that the contentions raised by the counsel for the parties needed consideration.
