Former principal secy to CM Soren appears before ED
The directorate of enforcement (ED) on Monday questioned senior IAS officer and panchayati raj secretary Rajiv Arun Ekka for around 10 hours in connection with an ongoing money laundering probe, people aware of the development said.
Ekka arrived at the ED zonal office at 11 am and left after 9pm. Ekka, however, refused to speak to reporters over the questioning.
Sources in the federal agency said Ekka was questioned about his connections with Vishal Chaudhary, who is under the radar of the federal agency since last year when premises related to him was raided in May 2022, within days after the arrest of IAS Pooja Singhal.
The federal agency summoned Ekka after the BJP had
released a video featuring Ekka, who was allegedly signing official files at the private office of Vishal Chaudhary. A delegation of the BJP had submitted a complaint with the ED based on the video and sought a probe into the incident.
Ekka had earlier this month sought time after March 24 to appear before the central agency
in view of the Jharkhand assembly’s budget session.
The last assembly session ended on March 23. “Ekka appeared before sleuths of the Enforcement Directorate here in connection with a probe into the alleged irregularities in the MGNREGA scheme and money laundering linked to cases against Pooja Singhal,” an official of the central agency said.
The agency is also probing Singhal’s role in the alleged irregularities in the mining sector of the state as part of a case filed under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) along with the MGNREGA ‘scam’, the ED official said. The state government had earlier set up a one-member inquiry commission headed by Jharkhand high court’s former chief justice Vinod Kumar Gupta to probe into the allegations against Ekka. In view of the “signing of official documents at a private place”, BJP leader and former chief minister Babulal Marandi had written a letter to Chief Secretary Sukhdev Singh earlier this month, seeking a thorough investigation into the alleged involvement of a power broker in the case, besides an engineer in the Police Building Construction Corporation. Marandi also sought action against Ekka and departmental engineers.