New Delhi: The ED on Monday said it has attached benami assets worth Rs 17.48 crore of arrested accused Saumya Chaurasia, a deputy secretary in the Chhattisgarh chief minister's office, and coal trader Suryakant Tiwari in the coal levy "scam". Out of the total 51 provisionally attached properties, eight benami assets worth Rs 7.57 crore are "beneficially owned" by Chaurasia and the remaining 43 are "beneficially controlled" by the alleged main kingpin Tiwari, the federal probe agency said in a statement.
Benami means 'no name' or 'without a name'. A benami property is one in which the real beneficiary is not the one in whose name it has been purchased. The Enforcement Directorate had also issued last year a similar attachment order for assets under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) of the two accused and a few others. With the latest action, the total value of attached properties in this case stands at about Rs 170 crore.
The ED investigation relates to "a massive scam in which illegal levy of Rs 25 was being extorted for every tonne of coal transported in Chhattisgarh by a cartel involving senior bureaucrats, businessmen, politicians and middlemen," the agency has alleged. Nine people, including Chaurasia, Tiwari, his uncle Laxmikant, Chhattisgarh cadre IAS officer Sameer Vishnoi and another coal businessman Sunil Agrawal, were arrested last year.
Four people, including a "close confidant" of Chaurasia, two mining officers and an alleged conman who posed as an ED officer, were arrested this month by the agency. All of them are in judicial custody. "Probe has established that proceeds of the crime worth Rs 540 crore were acquired in this extortion racket. The ED is investigating the entire gamut of the extortion racket," the statement said.
The money laundering case stems from an Income Tax department complaint that was registered following raids by the taxman in June 2022. The agency has said Tiwari was the "main henchman" at the ground level who deployed his employees in various regions to extort money from coal transporters and industrialists. His team was physically coordinating with lower-level government functionaries and coal transporters and representatives of user companies, according to the agency.
"Since his employees were spread across the state, they maintained WhatsApp groups, excel sheets of each coal delivery order and the extorted amounts and shared them with Suryakant Tiwari, who in turn maintained detailed handwritten diaries of the incoming bribe amounts and their utilisation for purchase of benami lands, payment of bribes and payments for political expenditure etc," the ED said. "This kind of systemic extortion was not possible without the knowledge and active participation of the state machinery," it said. (PTI)
