Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla can stop worrying about a criminal complaint that's been hanging over their company since 2020. The Bombay High Court, on Friday, quashed the case against the designers and their firm, Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla Designers Pvt Ltd, saying that late payment of tax is not the same thing as trying to dodge it.

The number at the heart of this was Rs 5.27 lakh, the self-assessment tax the Income Tax Department said the company owed for 2017-18 and hadn't paid on time. The department's case, built on a February 2020 order from a magistrate's court at Ballard Pier, was that the directors running the company were responsible for what it called an attempt to evade tax.

But here's the detail that mattered to Justice RR Bhonsale. The company paid the full amount on October 19, 2018, three days after the department sent a show-cause notice. The interest, about Rs 1 lakh, came later, in March 2020, but it did come.

Justice Bhonsale, reading Section 276C(2) of the Income Tax Act, said the law demands a conscious, positive act aimed at avoiding payment. Simply being slow to pay doesn't clear that bar. "A mere non-payment of the tax or a delayed payment cannot be included" as wilful evasion, the court held, and added elsewhere that continuing the prosecution would be a "manifest abuse of the process of law."

The designers' lawyer, Shivani Shinde, had argued exactly this: that clearing the dues within three days of the notice showed there was no intent to run from the tax bill in the first place. She also pointed out that the department's complaint never spelled out any specific overt act of evasion, just the fact of a delay.

The Income Tax Department, represented by advocates PC Chotary and Sangita Choure, pushed back hard. Their argument was that the company had multiple chances to pay before the notice arrived and chose not to, and that this pattern itself pointed to an intention to evade. They wanted the matter sent to trial rather than settled at the High Court stage.

The court didn't buy it. The three-day gap between notice and payment, in the judge's view, undercut any claim of wilful evasion, whatever earlier delay there had been.

With the complaint and all proceedings tied to it now quashed, Jani and Khosla, two of the most recognisable names in Indian fashion whose work has dressed Bollywood for decades, are out from under a criminal case that had stretched on for roughly six years without ever reaching trial. Whether the department appeals this order to a higher forum is the only thread still open.