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The Income Tax Department began a ‘search operation’ from 23 September on a large syndicate involving business persons/middlemen and government officials. The raids were carried out on the basis of intelligence developed over six months.
As many as 25 houses and 15 commercial spaces were searched, while four offices were surveyed. Some suites of the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, which were rented by two of the middlemen for meetings with clients were also searched.
These middlemen provided end-to-end services to “corporates and entrepreneurs” from allotment of land to obtaining all government clearances.
The IT Department has further recovered digital data from it as evidence, despite the use of encrypted modes of communication and tools to conduct its transactions. Moreover, in this entire case, angadias were also used by the liaisons for cash transactions.
During the search, Rs 150 lakh were seized from one such angadiya.
Each person involved in the syndicate has done transactions of about Rs 200 crore, as per the documents recovered that included a summary of the total cash generated and disbursed.
What’s more, a business person/middleman has earned a huge unaccounted income by buying land from farmers and transferring it to government undertakings and big corporates. Several senior officials and their relatives have been found investing in these schemes.
Date-wise transactions of cash deposits of about Rs 27 crore and cash payments of Rs 40 crore have been found in the evidence.
For certain payments made to various people and amounting to about Rs 23 crore, code names have been used.
So far, cash of more than Rs 4.6 crore and jewellery valued at Rs 3.42 crore have been seized, while four lockers found in the search have been put under restraint.
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