Part-13: Tax-Avoidance & Investment for Eight(8), Nine(9) & Ten(10) figure earning Entrepreneurs & Investors Seven Heavens Legal_India and Crypto
We, at Seven Heavens Legal try to engage with the RBI / stakeholders on a regular basis to try convince them to consider ICOs and Cryptocurrency tokens as Security. In a different 2017-2018, Bombay HC matter, we had appointed Senior Counsel, Anil Antukar as our counsel to argue in addition to his arguments, also on the basis of Doctrine of Proportionality, he being a senior from same law school humbly and whole-heartedly agreed to using it before the Bench.
We had experienced this doctrine while working in Civil law jurisdictions and recognized in India too, where in "Ranjit Thakur v. Union of India",
A signalman in the Army was already serving a 28-day punishment for insubordination. During this period he refused to eat his food even though directly ordered to do so. This further act of insubordination made his Commanding Officer try him for summary court martial. He was subsequently removed from service. The High Court dismissed his writ petition. The Supreme Court after referring to Lord Diplock's classic statement on judicial review in Council for Civil Services Union v. Minister of Civil Service and Bhagat Ram held:
That a sentence should not be so disproportionate to the offence as to shock the conscience and that the doctrine of proportionality would ensure that if a decision of the court even as to sentence is an outrageous defiance of logic, then it was not immune from correction.
Unfortunately, the HC Bench of Justice Dharmadhikari and Smt. Dangre JJ did not consider / discuss the doctrine in their decision dismissal, which obviously went against our client and MORE IMPORTANTLY against all our efforts to engage with RBI / stakeholders using this doctrine on behalf of one of our other client, as they knew about the decision and the non-discussion about the doctrine gave power to their presumptions against it.
But as fate would have it, a couple of years later, the Hon. Supreme Court used the very same doctrine to lift the crypto-ban!
MORAL - To all lawyers / advocates / counsel, we at Seven Heavens Legal would request you to not get into hair-splitting to unclassify or distance 'Crypto' in India, from its hard fought freedom. Any further regulatory harm to the Crypto ecosystem in India would be in outright defiance of logic (as we already seem to be heading to the greatest economic depression after the Great Depression of 1929 and if a parallel economic revival is in progress, even though unregulated largely at the present moment, it is worth its value in gold / BS-VI diesel!) and be immediately made subject to judicial review again.
And we also assure in public view, that in case the RBI / Stakeholder makes an attempt to do so, we will stand firm with Crypto-enthusiasts, Crypto-traders, Crypto-whales, Crypto-supporters and Crypto-exchanges and re-fight another battle tooth-and-nail!