A Bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel Nagu has held that no arrest can be effected under Section 69 of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 for alleged tax evasion or fraud unless the order recording the officer's 'reasons to believe' for the arrest has first been communicated to the person concerned — including by electronic means such as registered email or the mobile number on record with the GST authorities.
The Court separately held that once a pre-arrest bail application is dismissed as not maintainable, a court cannot go on to separately grant or extend interim protection from arrest, since that protection is ancillary to the pending application and cannot survive its dismissal — closing off a route some accused persons had used to retain de facto protection after their substantive application had already failed.
The ruling gives GST assessees a concrete, enforceable procedural safeguard: field formations must now communicate the Section 69 arrest order and its recorded reasons before making an arrest, giving the taxpayer a genuine window to seek anticipatory bail before any arrest is actually carried out, rather than learning of the department's reasoning only after the fact.