9911796707
TMI Blog1953 (7) TMI 5X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... es. The respondents cry out the upset price, invite bidders and when the price offered exceeds the reserve price the sales are knocked down in the names of the highest bidders and those bidders pay the prices to the owners and take over from them the catches. If the reserved prices are not reached the owners take the fish to the market. These respondents are paid for the duties performed by them at the rate of quarter to one anna per rupee. On these facts the respective conten- tions are advanced, Viz., that these respondents are commission agents coming within the meaning of "dealers" and liable to sales tax and that they are only brokers or criers at auctions and do not therefore come within the meaning of "dealers" liable to pay sales ta ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... late to the Madras General Sales Tax Act have been authoritatively defined by a Full Bench of the Madras High Court in Radhakrishna Rao v. Province of Madras(1), which considered and dissented from the earlier Bench decision (Satyanarayana Rao and Viswanatha Sastri, JJ.) in Provincial Government of Madras v. Veera- bhadrappa(2), and which in its turn had dissented from Narasingamuthu Chettiar In re(3) and Province of Madras v. K. Sivalakshminarayana(4), and approved Public Prosecutor v. Narasimha Reddi(5), and the con- clusions arrived at by the Full Bench were as follow: "A broker is an agent employed to make a bargain for another and receives a commission on the transaction which is usually called brokerage. He has usually neither the cus ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... usiness for consideration. In the case of a commission agent the accepted mercantile practice is that he has control over or possession of the goods and he has the authority from the owner of the goods to pass the property in and title to the goods. If this is so, when a commission agent sells goods belonging to his principal with his authority and consent without disclosing to the buyer the name of the owner, there is certainly a transfer of property in the goods from the commission agent to the buyer. A business which consists in such transactions can properly be described as a business of selling goods. A similar position would arise even in the case of a com- mission agent buying for an undisclosed principal. A commission agent doing th ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... that such persons who do nothing more than crying out the bids at the auction and who have no custody or possession over the property auctioned and have no authority to pass the property in the goods to the purchasers can only be brokers. (1) Since reported as K. T. Pappanna Rowther, In re (1953) 4 S.T.C. 292, These activities of these respondents fall only within the scope of the duties of a broker as laid down in the Full Bench decision cited above and which is only in consonance with the trend of English decisions also on the subject which though not binding on us may be legitimately looked into as persuasive and helpful: State of Bombay v. Rajah Kul- karni(1), B. Laduram v. Ganesh Commercial Co.(2), Governor-General in Council v. Mun ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X
|
