GODFREY PHILLIPS INDIA LIMITED Vs. MUNICIPAL COUNCIL OF GOWRIBIDANUR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is a plaintiff's second appeal against the concurrent decision of both the Courts below dismissing its suit. The plaintiff is an incorporated company engaged in manufacture of cigarettes. For such manufacture it purchases raw tobacco cured in a particular manner from cultivators in Gouribidanur taluk. During the period relevant to this litigation, it had a purchasing agent called C. V. Ramaiah who was conducting that agency as a partnership firm consisting of himself and a son of his. The tobacco purchased by the plaintiff through the said agent used to be brought to a godown or warehouse located within the municipal limits of gouribidanur Municipality, and then transported to places in Andhra pradesh for manufacture of cigarettes. The municipality levied octroi on such tobacco purchased by the plaintiff in the manner aforesaid which was objected to by the plaintiff as illegal. As the controversy between the plaintiff and the municipality could not be settled out of Court, the plaintiff filed the suit out of which this second appeal arises impleading the municipality as the first defendant and its agent C. V. Ramiah as second defendant seeking a declaration that no octroi was leviable In respect of the tobacco, an injunction restraininng the municipality from levying octroi thereon, for refund of octroi already collected and other Incidental reliefs. The municipality opposed the claim and asserted that tobacco purchased by the plaintiff in the circumstances mentioned above did attract octroi to accordance with the rules and bye-laws regularly and validly promulgated under the Mysore Town Municipalities Act.

(2.) Among other contentions, one of the contentions was that rules themselves had not been validly promulgated. The concurrent opinion of both the Courts against the plaintiff on this matter is not now challenged before me. Likewise, technical objections raised by the Municipality on the alleged lack of proper statutory notice etc. , against the maintainability of the suit, which have been concurrently held against it by both the courts below, have not been repeated before me.

(3.) The only question argued is the one covered by issue 3 framed in the suit. That issue reads a follows:" (3) Does plaintiff prove that there is no sale, purchase, use or consumption of the flue-cured Virginia tobacco within the limits of the first defendant municipality to make it subject to the octroi and therefore the levy of octroi on it is illegal and ultra vires of the powers of the first defendant -