ACB seizes assets worth ₹80 cr from AP chief engineer
HYDERABAD:: The Andhra Pradesh Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) on Saturday unearthed unaccounted wealth and assets estimated to be worth ₹80 crore from the properties of state roads and buildings department’s engineer-in-chief and his family members. The book value of the seized assets is placed at ₹8 crore but official estimates suggest that their market value could be over ₹80 crore. The ACB raids began on Saturday morning and were continuing at over 20 places across Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka till evening. In Hyderabad alone, searches were carried out at 11 places owned by engineer-in-chief M Gangadharam and his relatives.
ACB teams swooped on Gangadharam’s and his relatives’ houses simultaneously based on the information that he allegedly made illegal wealth thorough bribes and benami contracts.
The ACB recovered ₹40 lakh in cash and ₹50 lakh worth gold from Gangadharam’s house at Kukatpally and ₹42 lakh in cash from his benami contractors Nagabhushanam and Visweswaraiah in Guntur. Sources said Gangadharam came on ACB’s radar early this year when the state roads department proposed an increase in the cost of expanding the 9.6 km VisakhapatnamBheemili beach road from ₹65 crore to ₹195 crore.
Local media widely reported the allegations. HT couldn’t independently verify the authenticity of the video clip.
Singh, however, dismissed the charges and said the EVM wasn’t fully calibrated.
“When you have a fully calibrated machine, this cannot happen like this. But they (journalists) misrepresented the facts without trying to understand the whole issue,” she told HT.
In a statement, the election commission said the team of officers, led by Andhra Pradesh CEO Bhanwar Lal, will supervise the implementation of all administrative and security instructions for conduct of elections.
“The integrity of EVMs and the VVPATs to be used in the poll will be demonstrated to the complete satisfaction of all stakeholders. These teams will remain in the assembly constituency till the counting is over,” the commission said.
But crying foul, a Congress delegation comprising Mohan Prakash, Digivijaya Singh, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Vivek Tankha and KC Mittal, knocked at the doors of chief election commissioner Nasim Zaidi on Saturday and demanded scrapping the use of EVMs in upcoming elections.
The party also demanded that the election commission direct “impartial and unimpeachable” experts to revisit and re-verify the authenticity of all the voting machines being deployed in the two by-elections in Madhya Pradesh.
BJP veteran LK Advani had raised doubts about the possibil- ity of EVMs malfunctioning after the 2009 elections when the UPA emerged victorious second time in a row.
Some of the searches were also in connection with the Jain brothers of Delhi, who were named by the agency when it attached a hotel in Dwarka managed by Radisson Blu in a money laundering case.
An agency official said the operation had three specific targets — bogus import businesses, premises being used for conversion of black money to white and entry operators, actual people involved in money laundering.
“Investigations had revealed that certain entry operators and fraudsters were using network of companies (to launder money), some of which have been used repeatedly while some other were discarded after use or kept dormant for a long period,” said ED spokesperson AK Rawal.
An operator in Mumbai, identified as Jagdish Prasad Purohit, was allegedly found to be running 700 shell companies with 20 dummy directors.
The operator is accused of converting ₹46.7 crore of illegal cash to legal money for Bhujbal, a former Maharashtra deputy chief minister who is in jail on laundering charges.
After the government pulled out 86% of India’s cash in circulation last November to stamp out corruption and illegal transactions, many of these firms helped tax evaders convert slush funds into legal money, experts say.
Senior ED officials said while no one was arrested during the raids, questioning of the suspects was underway.
Officials said multiple teams of the ED raided premises of suspected shell firms in Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Patna, Ranchi, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar and Bengaluru, among others. An HT investigation in January found thousands of phantom businesses and drop-box addresses masquerading as company headquarters registered in Delhi and Kolkata alone.
A source in the agency said some shell companies were found to have remitted huge amounts to other countries for imports which never took place. These companies, the sources said, are being probed for their alleged links to Reddy. The official added that Yadav Singh and Bhujpal are being probed for conversion of black money to white.
The drive was part of a recent PMO directive to check the illegal operations of these companies.
At one of the premises in Mumbai, a scanned copy of an apparently fake Interpol ID card bearing the name of one Chetan Shah was found on a laptop.
WHAT ED FOUND OUT DURING THE RAIDS
1. Among the 110 locations raided by ED included one allegedly belonging to a person named Jagdish Prasad Purohit. Purohit allegedly admitted that he had formed around 700 shell companies using 20 dummy directors. Out of 700 fake firms 130 are still in existence. “He had also provided accommodation entry to the tune of rupees 46.7 crores to Chhagan Bhujbal,” ED said in a statement.
2.The directorate said that in Kolkata, more than 50 companies had the same registered address which was found to be a vacant residential premises . When questioned, the landlord of the premises said he had let out the premises three years ago to an individual who disappeared in December.