At Birla office, I-T found entries marked ‘payment’ for ‘Project J (Environment)’

The raid was conducted as a follow-up to CBI probe into the group’s alleged role in Hindalco coal allotment scandal.

With Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar indicating that projects dealt with by former UPA environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan will be put under the scanner, a set of entries in documents recovered by the Income-Tax Department from the office of the Aditya Birla Group during a raid in October 2013 could also be up for scrutiny.

The raid was conducted as a follow-up to the CBI probe into the group’s alleged role in the Hindalco coal allotment scandal.

Two annexures, categorised as Annexure A-1 and Annexure A-2, are now part of the appraisal report prepared by I-T’s investigation wing and as first reported by The Indian Express (on January 15, 2015), the assessment wing has a March 2016 deadline to complete its report
the findings. A scrutiny of the 167-page appraisal report shows that there are 13 entries listed on Page 2 of Annexure-2 which are called “payments under Project – J, Environment and Forest” and these add up to Rs 7.08 crore. Dates of these entries are between January 9, 2012 and February 2, 2012.

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The two Birla executives whose statements were recorded by the IT sleuths after the search were also questioned about these “Project J” entries but they did not provide specific answers. Their statements on nature of entries found in the recovered documents, too, form part of the appraisal report.

Anand Kumar Saxena, Deputy General Manager (Accounts) of ABMCL (Aditya Birla Management Corporation Pvt Ltd) said the entries were a “summary of unaccounted cash receipts already recorded.” Shubhendu Amitabh, Group Executive President, said: “The notings on this page relates to a proposal project which was under contemplation upon by me in course of my real estate financing activity. This was only at a proposal stage…”

The IT Department had recovered Rs 25.13 crore in cash from the Delhi office of ABMCL during the search. On December 19 last year, The Indian Express gave a written questionnaire to the company asking, among other things, details on these 13 entries listed under “Project – J, Environment and Forest.” No response was received.

When asked about these entries today, an ABMCL spokesperson said: “We don’t know how this matter is being remotely connected to us and make no sense of any suggestions of payments being made to the former Environment Minister.”
Natarajan was unavailable for comment.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More

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