The Income Tax department, beginning this financial year, has decided to ‘name and shame’ all category of taxpayers who have a default of Rs one crore and above.
E-commerce marketplace Askme Bazaar plans to help small and medium vendors who are transacting on its site by arranging credit and insurance products for them. These services will be provided via Askme Fin, the groups’ financial services platform. In the last 2-3 months, Askme Fin has helped about 75 SMEs to raise loans from banks and SMEs, Pawan Lohia CEO, Askme Fin, told FE.
AskMe Fin has tied up financial institutions such as Mahindra Finance, Bajaj Finserv, Religare, Capital Float, ICICI Bank, Sme.com and Mandi.com to help SMEs access loans and is in talks with other banks and NBFCs who can lend to vendors.
Anand Sonbhadra, group – CFO of AskMe Fin, said his firm had facilitated disbursements of Rs 30 lakh across 150 merchants till date. The firm hopes to assist 10,000 online and offline merchants raise loans worth around Rs 1,000 crore by the end of March 2017. The average loan size varies from Rs 8-10 lakh, he added.
Askme Pay intends to add 2-3 million merchants. AskMe Pay, the payment platform of AskMe Group will be launched by June and will enable integration of other wallets on its platform. AskMe Pay will largely earn revenue via merchant discount rates and loan referral commissions from lenders, which is the range of 20-30% of the processing fee. Also services related to customer relationship management, marketing and promotional activities will fetch revenue from the merchant, Sonbhadra explained.
According to a TechSci Research Report – India Mobile Wallet Market Opportunities and Forecast, 2020, the mobile wallet market in India is projected to grow to $ 6.6 billion by 2020. A Nielsen report in February adjudged Paytm the most popular mobile wallet followed by Freecharge and MobiKwik, respectively.
Financial technology startup Defmacro Software , which owns and operates online tax returns filing platform ClearTax , has raised $2 million (Rs 13.3 crore) from FF Angel , the angel investing arm of Peter Thiel-led Founders Fund , and Sequoia Capital .
The five year-old company will use the proceeds from the round to launch a slew of consumer-focused tax-saving products, including mutual funds and other equity-linked saving schemes. It will also be adding to its leadership team, said Archit Gupta , chief executive of ClearTax.
“We have taken the long route, and now we are extremely excited to have some of the biggest thought leaders and investors on board as our partners,” Gupta said. “We are an instrument-agnostic platform that will allow consumers to choose their rate of return and select what to have in their tax savings basket.”
The transaction, which closed last week, marks FF Angel’s first investment in India, and comes a month after Bengaluru-based ClearTax secured $1.3 million in a seed funding round from a group of Silicon Valley investors including PayPal cofounder Max Levchin and Scott Banister, an early investor in Facebook and Uber.
Capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is planning to take a number of steps to deepen it, including forcing thousands of non- or poorly-traded companies to delist and introducing more trading instruments, especially in the commodity space.
Online retailers would be banned from stopping a customer in one EU country buying from a website based in another, under a proposal issued on Wednesday to make it easier for consumers to shop across the bloc.
The European Commission said its law would stop “geoblocking” where companies limit access to their websites based on user location, often forcing customers to use versions based in their own country, sometimes with higher prices.
“In the online world, all too often consumers are blocked from accessing offers in other countries,” the Commission said in a statement.
“Such discrimination has no place in the single market.”
The law would affect companies such as Amazon, eBay and Zalando as well as to sales of services provided in a specific location, for example car rental, accommodation and concert tickets.
It would not initially apply to copyright-protected items such as e-books, music and games, although those might be included soon, the Commission said. So for the time being a German citizen would still be unable to buy a Spotify subscription in, for example, Estonia, where it is much cheaper.
The music industry welcomed the exemption, saying that to include such services in the geoblocking proposal would be “a serious blow for cultural diversity.”
Under Wednesday’s proposal, which requires the approval of the European Parliament and national governments to become law, retailers would not be allowed to block access to websites based on a user’s location or to re-route customers to a website version based in their own country without their consent.
Amazon already makes its websites accessible to customers anywhere in Europe, and says 98 percent of its own stock is available to shoppers from any European country.
While e-commerce websites will not be allowed to prevent customers in one EU country buying products in another, they will not be forced to deliver cross-border.
Therefore, an Italian buying a TV from a German website would either have to arrange their own delivery or collect it at the trader’s premises.
The Commission hopes the new rules will increase the proportion of consumers who buy online from another country, currently only 15 percent.
“The European Commission is doing the right thing by helping solve practical problems faced by online businesses, particularly small and medium sized businesses,” said eBay’s’ Paul Todd, Senior Vice President of EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
A business group said the proposal failed to address the reasons companies use geoblocking, such as differing VAT rates and consumer protection rules.
“This is like putting a sticking plaster on a broken leg,” said John Higgins, director general of DIGITALEUROPE, which represents companies such as Sony, Google and Dropbox.
In a separate proposal, the EU executive sought to increase the transparency of prices for cross-border parcel delivery and to give national authorities the power to assess whether they are affordable.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-ecommerce-geoblocking-idUSKCN0YG1DC
India today promised a conducive environment for Chinese investors and urged them to participate in ‘Make in India’ and other flagship programmes of the government to boost bilateral trade.
“We will facilitate your efforts to make your investments in India profitable. We must take advantage of the opportunities that abound in the growth of both our economies,” said President Pranab Mukherjee addressing a meeting of the India-China Business Forum here on the second day of his four-day visit to China.
The forum, attended by industrialists and businessmen of both sides, was told by the President that India would like to see greater market for Indian products in China in a bid to balance bilateral trade which is now in China’s favour.
This, he said, would particularly be needed in sectors where the two countries have natural complementarities as in drugs and pharmaceuticals and IT and IT-related services and agro products.
“It is a matter of satisfaction that there is emerging focus on two-way investment flows,” he said.
The President noted that the bilateral trade between India and China has grown steadily since the turn of this century from USD 2.91 billion in 2000 to USD 71 billion last year.
Guangdon province boasts of a USD one trillion economy with high manufacturing and other industries along with being a powerful export house of China. It has sister province relationship with Gujarat and Maharashtra.
A pilot smart city cooperation project has been announced between Shenzhen and the Gujarat last year.
Referring to the links of 2nd century before the Christian era between Guangdong and Kanchipuram through a direct sea route, Mukherjee said this is an exciting time for India and China to reinforce the old linkages and join hands for new.
Noting that India has recorded a growth rate of 7.6 per cent each year for over a decade now, he said India believes that it cannot grow in isolation.
“In an increasingly interconnected world, India would like to benefit from technology advances and best practices of different countries.
“The comprehensive reforms introduced in key areas of our economy have enhanced the ease of doing business in India. Our foreign investment regime has been liberalised through simplified procedures. And removal of restrictions on foreign investments,” he said.
The President said these reforms have renewed the interest of global investors in India. In 2014, there was a 32 per cent growth in investments and in 2015, India emerged as one of the biggest global investment destinations, he said.
Mukherjee said India would like more of China’s overseas direct investment which has now crossed USD 100 billion mark.
He said the Indian government was setting up industrial corridors, national investment and manufacturing zones and dedicated freight corridors to stimulate investment in this sector.
Its ‘100 Smart Cities” initiative will transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy, he said.
“India welcomes your participation in these programmes. Chinese companies with inherent strengths in infrastructure and manufacturing can look towards India as an important destination in their ‘Going Global’ strategy.
“On their part, Indian companies can partner with Chinese enterprises in the new domain of ‘Internet of Things’ which underlines the ‘Made in China 2025’ strategy,” he said.
The President said he was happy to note that a good start has been made by Chinese businesses who are investing in infrastructure projects and industrial parks in India.
Bilateral cooperation in India’s railway sector is also progressing well, he said.
A good number of premier Indian IT firms and other manufacturers are present in China, he said and noted that Indian entrepreneurs were also considering the prospects of jointly exploring opportunities in third countries.
Summing up, the President said India believed there was great potential for economic and commercial cooperation among the two countries, which faced similar opportunities on coming together.
“To realise the full potential of our economic partnership, it is important to bridge the information gap between our business communities.
“We are committed to providing a conducive environment for more investments from China. We stand ready to facilitate many more collaborations between the industry and businesses of our two countries across different sectors. India invites investors from China to be partners in India’s growth story,” he said.
Source:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/52428771.cms
Private equity firm Nalanda Capital has registered with the US market regulator Securities & Exchange Commission to raise $620 million for its new fund, according to an Economic Times report citing sources.Last October, Westbridge Capital had also raised $575 million more to invest in Indian companies, as per a media report.
The department has begun publishing the names of tax defaulters in leading national dailies since last year and has named 67 such defaulters from across the country till now with their vital details like addresses, contacts, PAN card number and shareholders in case of companies.
The earlier exercise was restricted to people with huge defaults to the tune of about Rs 20-30 crore but the new measure will bring to the fore those names who have defaulted a tax of Rs 1 crore or more. “It has been decided to ‘name and shame’ all category of taxpayers including personal and corporate taxpayers who have a default of Rs 1 crore and above by March, 31 which is the end of 2016-17 financial year.
Source: http://indianexpress.com/article/business/economy/it-dept-to-name-and-shame-crorepati-defaulters-this-fiscal-2817347/#sthash.jCduzRT8.dpuf