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Journalism of Courage
After the success of the 2020 web series Scam 1992, based on the Harshad Mehta scam that came to light in the same year, the trailer of a successor series named Scam 2003 – The Telgi Story has been released on August 4.
As with the 1992 series, it is believed to take a peek at one of India’s most well-known cases of financial fraud, centring Abdul Karim Telgi, who hailed from a village in Karnataka and would go on to mint tens of thousands of crores through ‘stamp scams’. The show will be adapted from the Hindi book Reporter ki Diary (Reporter’s Diary), authored by journalist and news reporter Sanjay Singh.
Here is a look at the man, the scam, and what led him to go on undetected for years – until his eventual arrest.
Telgi was born in 1961 in a small panchayat town of Karnataka named Khanapur, which lies on the border with Maharashtra. His father worked with the Railways and he hailed from a lower-middle class family. After the death of his father, Telgi was forced to take up odd jobs, including selling eatables on trains.
In search of money, he moved to Saudi Arabia. Upon returning, he allegedly tried his hand at making fake passports and then switched to making fake stamp papers. Stamp papers are used to authenticate legal documents in India and the government sells them through registered vendors. They cost amounts such as Rs 10, Rs 100, Rs 500, etc. and this amount is to be paid to the government when carrying out certain agreements, such as the sale of land or for certain court purposes.
The amount paid goes to the state governments.
A shortage of stamps and stamp papers at the time, to carry out various legal paperwork, presented an opportunity for Telgi. A later probe revealed that Telgi also engineered the shortage, in connivance with a few officials of the Indian Security Press at Nashik, Maharashtra. Thus, an artificial shortage and assistance from officials within the system helped expand his illegal business throughout the country. He could sell his fake to desperate people who were in need of the papers. This continued throughout the 1990s.
A report in The Indian Express noted that while Telgi declared an income of a few lahks each year between 1996 and 2003 according to his tax returns, a tax tribunal in Bengaluru said in 2010 that he had accumulated “huge unaccounted sum from the racket of counterfeit stamp papers”. The Tax Department assessed his income for the assessment year 1996-97 alone at Rs 4.54 crore, out of which Rs 2.29 crore was “unaccounted”.
Telgi’s lawyer argued that the alleged unaccounted money was from his kerosene transportation business, but the claim was dismissed after he failed to produce documents to show he was in that business.
According to an Indian Express report from 2017, a case of fake stamp paper was registered in 1991 and another in 1995. But investigations by the Mumbai Police were allegedly lax, and Telgi got away.
In 2002, Sub-inspector Ramakant Kale of Pune City Police received a tip-off from his son, constable Ajit Kale, and arrested a few men on charges of selling fake stamp papers in Pune. The information gleaned from the questioning of these men led Pune Police to one Abdul Karim Telgi, who had been arrested a few months earlier in 2001 on charges of forgery and was then lodged in Bengaluru jail.
With mounting public pressure, the Maharashtra government constituted a Special Investigation Team, (SIT), and Telgi’s run came to an end. A separate Karnataka Police SIT, headed by IPS officer Sri Kumar, was called STAMPIT.
A subsequent investigation of the case revealed the extent of Telgi’s actions. Later booked in multiple cases across states, Telgi had reportedly developed a nexus with government officers while running the scam and the names of several top police officials and politicians had cropped up during the investigations. These names have not come to light.
In an instance that revealed the extent of Telgi’s influence, on January 9, 2003, Sri Kumar and Subodh Jaiswal, who headed the Maharashtra SIT, found policemen partying with Telgi in his Colaba house. R S Sharma, then Commissioner of Mumbai Police, verbally ordered the suspension of an Assistant Police Inspector, but there was no action. Jaiswal submitted his report in April 2003.
Meanwhile, responding to a petition from activist Anna Hazare, the Bombay High Court directed the Maharashtra government to appoint a senior officer to supervise the probe. S S Puri, a retired Additional Director General of Police was appointed for the job, and Jaiswal was asked to assist him. The SIT made the first major arrest in 2003: Anil Gote, a Samajwadi Janata Party legislator from Dhule, Maharashtra. And on December 1, 2003, a day after his retirement, Commissioner Sharma was arrested for allegedly shielding Telgi.
The SIT went on to arrest 54 persons, including two MLAs — Gote and Krishna Yadav, who was expelled from the Telugu Desam Party after the allegation surfaced. In 2004, the investigations were taken over by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which filed a long chargesheet against Telgi in August of that year.
“There was no pressure except for pressure to perform and collect evidence. While the case was subsequently handed over to the CBI, Telgi pleaded guilty to all the counts that we booked him for. He never challenged it,” S S Puri had told The Indian Express. “Telgi was an intelligent man. The case only shows the failure of our system to reform him,” he added.
Charges and fines against Telgi
In 2005, when the Tax Department first raised a demand of Rs 120 crore against Telgi, it was one of the highest tax demands against an individual.
In 2007, Telgi was convicted of the scam and awarded 30 years of imprisonment and a fine of Rs 202 crore. This was under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act and Section 120 (criminal conspiracy). The court also awarded punishment to 43 other accused in this case. Most of the accused were persons employed by Telgi for selling fake stamp papers. Before the verdict, Telgi had pleaded guilty, reportedly following the advice of his wife Shahida.
But even from inside the jail, Telgi allegedly managed to carry on his business. This was revealed from the interrogation of his foot soldiers arrested in October 2002. “Police officers on Telgi’s payroll provided him with mobile phones which he used to carry out his business. By the time the jail authorities caught on, put the number on surveillance and wrote to the telecom operators, Telgi changed his SIM,” an official said.
While in police custody, much before his arrest in 2001, Telgi was allegedly afflicted with AIDS. In 2017, he died of multi-organ failure in a Mumbai hospital.
A Maharashtra court in 2018 acquitted Telgi and others who were accused in the paper stamp scam case. Charges against Telgi were abated after his death the previous year.
