Britain’s Cairn Energy PLC, which gave India its biggest onshore oil discovery and a gas find that opened the KG basin, is keen to reinvest in the country if a retrospective tax issue it is facing is resolved, its chief executive said.
Cairn, which in early 1990s grew the Ravva oil and gas field in the Krishna Godavari basin in the Bay of Bengal and then went on to find the country’s biggest onland oil discovery in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan, was in 2014 slapped with a tax demand of Rs 10,247 crore over an internal business reorganisation it did of its India business years back.
The tax department confiscated its dividend income, stopped tax refund and sold its shares to recover the tax demand which was raised using the 2012 retrospective tax legislation.
