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| Noose tightens around Koda |
| Saubhadro Chatterji / Ranchi Nov 13, 2009, 00:20 IST |
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After the group interrogation held in Ranchi on Tuesday, top Income Tax (I-T) officials said former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda’s friends had in their statements confirmed their activities in Jharkhand amounting to about Rs 200 crore.
The activities relate to floating new companies and buying sick state public sector units. The I-T reports also suggest that Koda and his friends tried to convert black money amounting to Rs 50 crore into white by routing it through three Kolkata-based finance companies.
The investigating officers of this case have come to Delhi from Ranchi and Mumbai to hold meetings with the top officials about the status of the investigations.
With two key figures — Sanjay Choudhary and Binod Sinha — still absconding, I-T and Enforcement Directorate (ED) sleuths may need a few more days to unearth the details of the overseas business.
Binod Sinha’s brother Vikas, under arrest, has complained of stomach pain and got admitted in a government hospital in Delhi on Wednesday.
Other than mining leases and electrification tenders, Koda and friends are believed to have made a lot of money through transfers and postings. There were two hotbeds of their activity: A flat in the upscale Doranda area in Ranchi and a palatial bungalow on Kanke Road. According to an I-T official, “Koda, in addition to floating companies, started purchasing land. Transfers and postings were also negotiated at the Kanke road resort. The mining deals and ‘industrial projects’ were discussed and decided at night.”
Once at the Doranda flat, an Indian Police Service Officer seeking a transfer was made to climb the stairs so that Koda and his people could speak to him from a position of strength, said Rajeev Kumar, a counsel for Durga Oram, who filed the first public interest suit against Koda in the Jharkhand High Court.
Koda and his men had hired Devendra Mukhia, who is being interrogated, as their “sting operation specialist”. He would record, using secret cameras, the meetings with bureaucrats. The clips were later used to armtwist the unsuspecting officers.
The group interrogation has confirmed what the I-T and ED officials, and even political rivals, had suspected, that Koda was a rubber stamp using his position but the brains behind the operations were Binod Sinha and Sanjay Choudhury.
Until five years ago, Sinha used to sell water pump spare parts from a tiny shop in Chaibasa. Today, he is on the board of many companies floated by the group. On July 31, 2008, he, along with Anil Bastawade, rented a flat in Dubai for a year for 270,000 dirhams. The family also bought 12.11 acres in Chaibasa, whose market value runs into crores of rupees.
Choudhury, a graduate of Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, was a local building material supplier in the Chaibasa area. Today, he heads companies like Mumbai-based Balaji group, which is suspected to be involved in routing money out of India. I-T officials have found documents showing hawala transactions for transfer of money on June 7, 2008 for “Sanjay bhai” in “Camtech a/c”. the amount is 1,19,00,000 but the currency is not specified. Koda and friends even bought four money-counting machines.
“They understood that Jharkhand was too small a place for their ambitions and wanted to divert most of their funds abroad,” a top I-T official told Business Standard.
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