Chhattisgarh coal levy case: ED conducts fresh searches against IPS officer, others

The Enforcement Directorate on Tuesday conducted fresh searches against a senior IPS officer and some individuals with political links in Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh as part of its ongoing money laundering investigation into an illegal coal levy case, official sources said.

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 said.

The ED has claimed at least Rs 540 crore was ''extorted'' over the last two years.

About two dozen premises related to those allegedly linked to Chhattisgarh Pradesh Congress Committee Treasurer Ramgopal Agrawal and arrested coal businessman Sunil Agarwal, IPS officer and Transport Commissioner Dipanshu Kabra, besides a few others in Raipur, Bhilai and Mahasamund in the state and in Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh were searched, the official sources said.

Kabra, a 1997-batch Indian Police Service officer, is an additional director general (ADG) rank officer and is also holding holding the charge of commissioner for public relations of the Chhattisgarh government.

Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel slammed the action and accused the ED of taking action at the behest of BJP leaders.

''The ED has once again conducted raids in Chhattisgarh. No section is left which has not been raided be it industrialists, traders, transporters, MLA, officers or farmers. Raids are never conducted in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat and Karnataka (all ruled by the BJP). It seems that the ED does not have offices there,” Baghel said.

He alleged that ''all action is being carried out at the behest of state and Central BJP leaders (in Chhattisgarh).” “The ED does not take action in Karnataka where '40 per commission' government is being run and Rs 6 crore cash recovered from an MLA. It does not take action against Adani. The agency does not take action in connection with the NAN (Nagrik Apurti Nigam) and chit fund scams (allegedly happened during the previous BJP government),” Baghel said.

Nine people, including state administrative service officer Saumya Chaurasia, coal trader Suryakant Tiwari, his uncle Laxmikant Tiwari and Chhattisgarh-cadre Indian Administrative Service officer Sameer Vishnoi, have been arrested till now in the case by the ED.

The money laundering case stems from an Income Tax Department complaint registered following raids by the taxmen in June 2022.

The agency has called Suryakant Tiwari the ''main henchman'' at the ground-level who deployed his employees in various regions to extort money from coal transporters and industrialists and his team was physically coordinating with lower level government functionaries and coal transporters and representatives of user companies.

''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 hand written diaries of the incoming bribe amounts and their utilisation for purchase of benami lands, payment of bribes, payments for political expenditure etc.'' ''This kind of systemic extortion was not possible without the knowledge and active participation of the state machinery,'' it said.