Jayalalithaa’s ₹13.69 crore tax arrears case: Madras High Court allows nephew Deepak to get impleaded

The Madras High Court, on Wednesday (December 3, 2025), allowed a petition filed by former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s nephew J. Deepak to implead himself in a writ petition filed by his sister J. Deepa challenging the recovery of income tax and wealth tax dues, to the tune of ₹13.69 crore, by her aunt.

Justice C. Saravanan permitted him to be impleaded as one of the parties to the case after he filed an affidavit stating that he came to know about the case filed by his sister only through a news report published in The Hindu after the previous hearing of the case on October 15.

The impleading petitioner’s counsel S.L. Sudarsanam said the High Court had declared his client as well as his sister as the legal heirs of their aunt who had died intestate and therefore, it was necessary to hear him too before taking any decision on his sister’s writ petition.

According to A.P. Srinivas, senior standing counsel for the Income Tax department, the Tax Recovery Officer had initially passed an order on July 23 this year for recovering a much larger sum of ₹36.56 crore, assessed to be the arrears to be paid by the former Chief Minister from the assessment years 1991-92 to 2011-12, from the two legal heirs who had inherited her properties.

Ms. Deepa filed a first writ petition on August 7, 2025 challenging the recovery on the grounds that any notice, assessment, or recovery proceeding issued in the name of a deceased person was wholly void ab initio and unenforceable and that the writ petitioner could not be termed as an assessee in default.

She also contended that no computation sheet had been furnished to her though many tax case appeals, regarding her aunt’s tax dues, were still pending. However, during the pendency of that writ petition, the Tax Recovery officer issued a revised recovery order for a lesser amount of ₹13.69 crore on August 4, 2025.

Justice Saravanan took cognisance of the revised recovery order and dismissed Ms. Deepa’s first writ petition on September 18, 2025 since it had become infructuous. Subsequently, she had filed the present writ petition challenging the revised recovery order too on multiple grounds.

Her counsel M. Sathyakumar told the court his client had no means to verify the correctness of the demand for tax arrears since she did not have access to her aunt till the latter’s death on December 5, 2016 and that she got declared as one of the legal heirs by the High Court only on May 27, 2020.

Even after the court’s order, the Chennai Collector handed over the possession of Jayalalithaa’s Poes Garden bungalow to the two legal heirs only on December 10, 2021 and an inventory taken at the premises did not lead to any documents related to the tax dues, the counsel told the Court.