Several countries offer tax rebates and incentives to attract Bollywood filmmakers to shoot films in their countries. Even UK provides an attractive tax rebate to filmmakers.
However, it seems, a Bollywood producer has taken advantage of some loopholes and claimed tax-rebates on non-existent films.
Sandeep Arora, known in Indian film circles as Karan Arora (and claims to produce films in India and Fiji), has been named by UK’s anti-fraud task force as one of the 10 most wanted for fraud worth over 4.5 million pounds.
Under British tax law, a film production company of qualifying films can claim a cash rebate of up to 25% of UK qualifying expenditure (there is no budget limit).
Between 2007 and 2011, Arora set up a production company with offices in central London (while he lived in Beckton), and falsely claimed value added tax and film tax rebate for movies that did not exist or in which he had no involvement.
Some of the films on which he claimed rebates were titled ‘Billy the Beagle’, ‘London Dreams’ (Salman Khan, Ajay Devgan), ‘Kuan Bola’, ‘Aagosh’, ‘Trapped’ and ‘Kia the Dream Girl’, but the films either didn’t exist at all or he had no involvement with them.
Detectives are appealing to trace Sandeep Arora.
