On May 9, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) provisionally attached ninety immovable assets, including luxury vehicles, jewellery, and cash valued at over Rs 51 crore, in a money laundering case related to an illegal Chhattisgarh coal levy scam.
These properties belonged to Chhattisgarh Congress MLAs Devender Yadav, Chandradev Prasad Rai and Chhattisgarh Pradesh Congress Committee treasurer Ramgopal Agarwal.
The agency also provisionally attached the properties of IAS officer Ranu Sahu and coal trader Suryakant Tiwari, the prime accused in this alleged scam. Even the properties of Congress spokesperson RP Singh and local party leader Vinod Tiwari have also been attached under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) 2002.
The ED said in a statement, “During the investigations, direct evidence of the financial linkages of the above persons with Suryakant Tiwari were established, and assets created by layering of the proceeds of crime or equivalent assets have been identified for attachment proceedings under PMLA 2002”.
The agency took similar action in October 2022 by attaching the properties of Suryakant Tiwari, IAS officer Sameer Vishnoi (5 properties), chief minister’s deputy secretary Saumya Chaurasia of Chhattisgarh civil service (21 properties), Sunil Agarwal and others. The properties provisionally attached included flats, coal washeries, plots of land, cash, and jewellery. As per the official statement, the ED has provisionally attached properties worth approximately Rs 221.5 Crore in this alleged scam.
While talking about the main accused, Suryakant Tiwari, the ED said, “Since his employees were spread across the state, they maintained WhatsApp groups, excel sheets of each coal delivery order and the extorted amounts and shared them with Suryakant Tiwari, who in turn maintained detailed handwritten diaries of the incoming bribe amounts and their utilisation for purchase of benami lands, payment of bribes, payments for political expenditure etc.”.
The agency also alleged the role of state machinery in this scam, “This kind of systemic extortion was not possible without the knowledge and active participation of the state machinery”. The investigation of money laundering was initiated by ED when the FIR was lodged on the complaint of the Income Tax Department.
The investigation relates to “a massive scam in which illegal levy of Rs 25 was being extorted for every tonne of coal transported in Chhattisgarh by a cartel involving senior bureaucrats, businessmen, politicians and middlemen”, the agency has alleged.
As a part of the investigation, the ED has searched 145 premises and arrested nine accused persons under PMLA. The agency alleged that a “grand conspiracy” was hatched in the natural resources-rich state to perpetrate a ‘coal levy scam’ in which Rs 540 crore has been “extorted” over the last two years.
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