The Telangana High Court had quashed the Telangana Value Added Tax (Second Amendment) Act-2017.
A bench of Chief Justice Ujjal Bhyuan and Justice P. Madhavi Devi, pronouncing the verdict in a batch of writ petitions challenging the Act, declared that the Second Amendment Act was ‘unconstitutional being devoid of legislative competence’. With the striking down of the Act by the HC, all the notices issued to the petitioners and the orders passed by authorities under Section 32 (3) of the VAT Act were set aside and quashed.
The bench noted that the intention of Parliament in ushering in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime through the 101st Constitution Amendment Act along with simultaneous enactment of the Central GST (CGST) Act and various State GST (SGST) Acts was to avoid multiplicity of taxes.
