Assam farmer with 37 bank passbooks, 44 ATM cards held

Bora said he had been keeping the passbooks,

ATM cards and other documents as sureties against loans given to other villagers, but we are not totally discounting the possibility of black money having been parked through these accounts.

VAIBHAV CHANDRAKANT NIMBALKAR, superintendent of police, Majuli

village. The raid on Saturday evening yielded 37 passbooks of nationalised banks and post office, 44 ATM cards, 34 cheque books and more than 200 blank cheques besides `22,380 in cash, a laptop and blank stamp papers.

“Bora said he had been keeping the passbooks, ATM cards and other documents as sureties against loans given to other

villagers, but we are not totally discounting the possibility of black money having been parked through these accounts,” Vaibhav Chandrakant Nimbalkar, Majuli’s superintendent of police, told Hindustan Times.

Bora, an investigating officer said, could get away with lighter punishment because scrapped high-value banknotes were not recovered from him. “We are questioning him to find out who parked how much money in the accounts in his possession,” he said.

Property dealer Shah, who had declared a whopping `13,860 crore of undisclosed wealth under the Income Declaration Scheme (IDS), appeared on a television show on Saturday night and claimed the money did not belong to him, only to be held by income tax officials for questioning. Shah’s disclosure under the Centre’s IDS, which ended in September, accounts for over 20% of the total `65,000 crore declared under the scheme.