Gunny bags with currency notes recovered from Bihar minister

The officials seized six gunny bags full of hundred-rupee and 500-rupee notes. While three bags were said to have been recovered from the residence of Hussain, the rest were obtained from his private secretary, Shahabuddin. The amount is estimated to be over Rs one crore.

Mishra said the residential and business premises of RJD’s Rajya Sabha MP and industrialist Prem Gupta were raidedat Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Mumbai in connection with the scams.

Rana’s premises here and his ancestral house at Narayanpur in Khagaria district were also raided. Rana, who was held in connection with some fodder scam cases, was released on bail recently.

The raids conducted early today morning were going on till late evening, Mishra said. He said that the raids were simultaneously being conducted in Patna, Bhagalpur, Narayanpur, Dehri on Sone, Hazaribagh, Chaibasa and Deoghar in Bihar, Gurgaon in Haryana besides Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Ghazibabad, Hyderabad, Chennai and Jaipur.

Asked why raids were conducted on the premises of Prem Gupta whose name did not figure in the fodder scam, the official alleged: "He is engaged in fund management for some top politicians." He, however, refused to name political figures for whom Gupta was doing the job. All of Gupta’s companies operating in Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai and Hyderabad were the means to invest the "illegal" money. One of Gupta’s companies, I S TLimited, has been the prime operator and the sleuths were carrying on the raids there. The I-T sleuths also carried out raids at the residences of nine engineers, some transporters and officials. Some of them are engineer-in-chief Capt S C Verma, retired engineer-in-chief Y N Yadav and Sobha Rani, personal assistant to director (purchase).

While the money involved in the fodder scam is around Rs 1,200 crore, the amount involved in the bitumen scam is Rs 400 crore. Income-Tax officials and Enforcement Directorate officials were entrusted with the job to trace out the money.

Mishra said since this was the first major operation against the senior officials, they had sought the help of paramilitary forces. According to him, this might have alerted the people.

Last month the Patna High Court, while monitoring the fodder scam, had pulled up the Income-Tax department for not taking interest in the matter of retrieving the hidden money. The monitoring Bench had threatened to take action against the officials.The next hearing of the case is on April 24. Though Mishra could not give the actual figure of the amount seized, sources said that the gunny bags seized from the residences of the minister and his private secretary contained over Rs one crore.

Meanwhile, BJP leader Sushil Mody alleged that Illyas due to his "closeness to Laloo" had amassed huge wealth after becoming minister. He said that he had been the key person behind the bitumen scam.