The Income Tax Department has detected hidden cloud servers and unaccounted income exceeding Rs 400 crore from its searches in the premises of a Chennai-based business group.

On February 25, the I-T Department had conducted a search in the case of a prominent business group based out of Chennai dealing in the business of non-ferrous metal processing in lead, copper and aluminium and money lending activities. The group is said to have reported a turnover of more than a thousand crore and is engaged in a number of businesses such as plastic manufacturing and financing activities, the CBDT said in a statement. 

Evidence was also gathered for the introduction of unaccounted funds as bogus share premium in one of the group companies. A large number of property documents, promissory notes, post-dated cheques taken as collateral security in the money lending business were also recovered during the search.

The search action resulted in cash seizure of Rs 1 crore and detection of unaccounted income exceeding Rs 400 crore. The investigations are still going on and the I-T Department is in the process of finalising the proceedings.

The highlight of the search is the discovery of hidden cloud servers other than the servers regularly used by the group for accounting and containing unaccounted transaction details often referred by the group as "kaccha" accounts.

Similarly, large amount of encrypted data was retrieved from a pen drive which was tracked and obtained from a third party premises. The pen drive and the database were decrypted to gather information about the unaccounted capital accumulated by the group, it said.

(With inputs from IANS)