Police seize 37 bank passbooks, 44 ATM cards from Assam farmer, questioning him

Assam’s Jintu Bora could well be the rustic version of Gujarat’s Mahesh Shah who declared Rs 13,860 crore under the income-tax disclosure scheme.

Guwahati

The farmer, an investigating officer said, could get away with lighter punishment because scrapped high-value banknotes were not recovered from him. (Reuters File Photo)

Assam farmer Jintu Bora could well be the rustic version of Gujarat’s Mahesh Shah who declared Rs 13,860 crore under the income-tax disclosure scheme.

Barely 24 hours after Shah told a Gujarati news channel that the money “belongs to other Indians”, the police in central Assam’s Majuli district raided Bora’s house in Madhupur 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 Rs 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 Rs 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 Rs 65,000 crore declared under the scheme.