Tainted I-T officer in soup over ‘dacoit in-law’s gift’

JAIPUR: The grandfather-inlaw was a plundering dacoit. The grandson-in-law is a senior income tax officer caught in corruption charges for amassing wealth way above his income.

People usually hide such shady ancestral history but I-T joint commissioner Ram Avtar Verma said a sizeable portion of his wealth is associated with his wife’s grandfather — a gun-toting “daku” — and his plunder.

Wife Sushila declared that her grandfather gave 80 tolas of gold (a tola is 11.663 grams) as a wedding gift. The booty is worth 24 lakh now.

But the dacoit gold will hardly help him escape. “An accused in a disproportionate assets case usually tries to enlist sources of income. But a dacoit as a source of income is unprecedented. It is not only strange and unverifiable but also an illegal source,” a senior CBI officer said.

Verma, now posted in Indore, swore by his wife’s family legacy. “Dacoits used to exist 40 years ago. What evidence can there be? Yes, he was a traditional dacoit,” he said.

The officer was in Jaipur then, when the CBI framed charges against him, wife Sushila, his brother-in-law and another relative. The investigating agency found they held 383% more assets, movable and immovable, than their known sources of income. Verma saw in his grandfather-in-law an escape route in a long-drawn court case after the CBI arrested him in June 2002.

He moved a CBI court in Jaipur in February, seeking quashing of the charge sheet. He argues that the prosecution sanction against him was “illegal”. But the CBI and other investigating agencies called Verma’s excuse “bizarre and unverifiable”.