IT raids in Bhopal yield huge amounts of cash

BHOPAL - The Income Tax department Thursday conducted raids at 13 places here including the houses of officials, businessmen and bank officials, IT department sources said. The raids in one house yielded more than Rs.2.5 crore in cash.

The raids, following information from the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) that “benami” (proxy) investments worth crores of rupees have been made in various financial institutions, were undertaken at the residence of Principal Secretary, Woman and Child Development, Tinu Joshi and her husband Arvind Joshi, who is the principal secretary in Jail and Parliamentary Affairs department among others.

The houses of former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) official M.A. Khan, Road and Bridge development engineer R.D. Chaudhary - posted at Rajgarh, Superintending Engineer in PWD Deepak Asai, his wife Jyoti Asai, who is an agent of ICICI bank), businessmen Sunil Agrawal and Pawan Agrawal dealing in fertilisers besides ICICI bank manager Seema Jaiswal and bank agent Bharti Bhasne were also raided.

“Since, nobody was found at the residence of Khan, the IT officials sealed the house as per rules. Khan was in Indore to attend a funeral. He had contacted the IT department and said that he would return soon”, an IT department official said.

Income Tax department is collecting details of accounts of concerned persons and their lockers are being searched. Documents relating to investment have been seized.

“Search operations were still on and at one place, note counting machines have been put into service to count the currency. Huge piles of notes have been recovered from this place. More than Rs 2.5 crore have already been counted by now,” the sources said.