RAIDS ON TN CHIEF SECY SHOCK INDIA
13 places of kin, relatives in TN, Nellore, Chittoor searched
Income-Tax raids sent shock waves across the corridors of power Wednesday as sleuths swooped down on the home of the Tamil Nadu chief secretary, P. Rama Mohana Rao. I-T officials raided his house in Anna Nagar as well as his office at the secretariat.
Handpicked for the top job by the former Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa, Mr Rao superseded 17 IAS officers to become the top babu, but Mr Rao had seemed to come off in poor light as significant seizures were made at the home of his kin — at least `30 lakh cash and 5 kg gold.
As many as 13 premises belonging to the chief secretary, his son and relatives in Nellore and Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh and in Karnataka were searched leading to more seizure of cash and gold across south India. The raids, which began at the crack of dawn, at around 5.45 am, at Mr Rao’s residence in Anna Nagar and continued till late into the evening, were conducted in connection with suspected amassing of wealth disproportionate to the known sources of income and tax evasion. Mr Rao suffers the ignominy of being the first Chief Secretary of a state to be raided by the I-T department.
Sources in I-T department said the raids on Mr Rao came after their interrogation of former TTD Board member Sekhar Reddy and seizure of `131 crore cash and 177 kg gold from premises belonging to him two weeks back. Deccan Chronicle had on December 9 reported that Mr Reddy was linked to a top bureaucrat at the Fort St George and that Mr Reddy was his benami.
Mr Rao’s office at the Secretariat, the seat of power of the TN Government, was also not spared as I-T sleuths raided his chamber for close to five hours.
Officials of the Enforcement Directorate and the CBI conducted raids and inspections at the offices of select cooperative banks in various parts of the state on Wednesday.
The ED inspected district cooperative banks of Kannur, Kozhikode and Thrissur while a team of the CBI officials inspected the records of district cooperative bank in Kollam and Malappuram Services Cooperative Bank.
The raids are mainly on account of deposits collected by the banks after November 8 when the Prime Minister had announced the decision to demonetise old `500 and `1,000 notes.
Sources familiar with the development said the inspections were conducted following a tip-off that some of these cooperative banks were conduits for parking unaccounted money sourced from the country and abroad. “We suspect that some accounts in these district cooperative banks were used to transfer unaccounted money that came from abroad through hawala channels,” said an official in the ED.
A group of 12 CBI officials descended on the office of the Kollam district cooperative bank in the morning and examined various records of transactions, while another team of officials went to the Services Cooperative Bank in Malappuram.