CBI begins probe against 12 postal officials over fraudulent transactions of Rs 11 crore

The CBI has begun a probe against 12 officials of the postal department who had allegedly siphoned off over Rs 11 crore from depositors' accounts through 1,297 sham transactions between 2015 and 2019, officials said on Friday.

A postal agent has also been booked by the agency who had connived with the officials to withdraw money from several post office depositors' accounts, they said.

The alleged racket involving 12 postal department officials ranging from post master to postal assistant continued unabated for four years at Varanasi Cantonment Head Office till anomalies were detected in a vigilance inquiry, they said.

The vigilance inquiry done by the regional office revealed that the officials had misappropriated the amount in connivance with SAS agent Pradeep Kumar Singh.

The officials named in the enquiry which also figure in the CBI FIR are: then postal assistants Sunil Kumar Yadav, Vinay Kumar Yadav, Saurabh Srivastava, Avinash Kumar and Manoj Pal; then assistant post masters Rajesh Kumar, Ramashankar Lal and Bechan Ram; then post masters Pankaj Kumar Tripathi and Anand Kumar Srivastava; and then SPOs Gauri Shankar Singh and Prabhakar Tripathi.