I-T raids 60 places across country

Income Tax officials raided 60 locations in 13 cities and towns across the country on Tuesday in connection with case pertaining to the alleged illegal investments and hawala transactions involving Jharkhand’s former Chief Minister Madhu Koda. The raids yielded benami property worth Rs 100 crore, reporst Madan Kumar.

Income Tax officials raided 60 locations in 13 cities and towns across the country on Tuesday in connection with case pertaining to the alleged illegal investments and hawala transactions involving Jharkhand’s former Chief Minister Madhu Koda. The raids yielded benami property worth Rs 100 crore.

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“Raids are being conducted at 60 places in the country,” Director in the Income Tax Department Ujjwal Choudhary confirmed to PTI.

He, however, refused to divulge why the raids were being conducted and the names of the persons and places involved. Koda and seven others were booked by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with financial irregularities to the tune of about Rs 4,000 crore last October.

The former chief minister is currently in judicial custody, having been arrested by the Jharkhand Vigilance Bureau.

Tuesday’s raids came nearly four months after Income Tax and Enforcement Directorate officials raided 70 places, including the residences of Koda and his associates last October. This time, the raids were conducted mainly in Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Chaibasa (Koda’s home district), Patna, Hazaribagh, Mumbai and Pune.

IT officials also raided four premises of Jharkhand Chief Minister Shibu Soren’s personal assistant Manohar Lal Pal in Ranchi and Jamshedpur. Pal, a former engineer with a coal company, is a partner in a steel company in Jamshedpur and is constructing a shopping mall in a posh area of the city.

The IT teams also swooped on the properties of a retired IAS officer and former state mines secretary, Jaishankar Tiwari, former chairpersons of the Jharkhand State Electricity Board, V.N. Pandey and B.M. Verma and a senior official of the State Pollution Control Board.

A senior IT official said details of the raids would be disclosed after scrutinising the records and properties found during the searches.