SUMAN K SHRIVASTAVA
Ranchi, May 26: With new revelations tumbling out of the cupboard of the cronies of politicians and bureaucrats every day, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) top officials are said to be perplexed to find how they have hijacked the whole administrative system.
Senior ED officials are said to be aghast to find out how the top politicians, bureaucrats and their cronies are active in Jharkhand to generate wealth to fill up their personal coffers. “Never in my career have I found such a sordid state of affairs in any part of the country,” said a senior ED official.
According to reports, these people decided everything in government. They influenced crucial policies like the State Excise policy, contracts and transfer-posting of the IAS and IPS and other officials, giving them a licence to loot the public coffer. “You can’t expect a DC or SP or any other official to do his/her work honestly if he/she has to pay a huge amount, say Rs 50 lakh to the political master every month,” mused a senior bureaucrat.
These people are not new to the system under the Hemant Soren government only. “A few of these middlemen, including Prem Prakash Srivastava were also active during the Raghubar Das government and were close to former Chief Secretary Rajbala Verma,” said Saryu Roy, Independent MLA and a crusader against corruption.
Ironically, the ill-gotten wealth also turned a few of them lecherous. According to sources, the mobile pictures and chats recovered from the mobile phones of one of them showed how they were entertained lavishly at the residence of one of them.
No wonder BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, today tweeted that photos and chats retrieved from one of the mobiles seized from a middleman will force the officers and politicians to hide their faces. “The country will find how Jharkhand is reliving the time of Wazid Ali Shah of Lucknow where luxury and glamour (vilashita) ruled the roost.
Notably, the ED is said to have turned aggressive in investigating the sleazy money trail after the Supreme Court rejected the Jharkhand Government’s objection to its probe beyond the MGNREGA scam in absence of an FIR.
Sources close to the ED said that the objections raised by the State Government to the agency’s probe into the mining and shell companies scam have been apparently rejected by the Supreme Court.
Moreover, the PMLA act does not stop the ED to continue its probe if it, while chasing the money trail of another, comes across an intelligence input indicating huge illegal money laundering, he said.
He pointed out that Section 66 of the PMLA Act empowers the ED to send a letter to the CBI to register an FIR in this regard which the agency has already done. “The revelations made by Pooja Singhal, her husband Abhishek Jha, District Mining Officers, Vishal Chaudhary, Prem Prakash Srivastava and Anil Jha have revealed that they are connected to each other and they in cohorts with the several senior bureaucrats ran the show in Jharkhand,” he added.
Incidentally, there have been varying views on whether the ED requires a predicate FIR to investigate a case, The Supreme Court in P Chidambaram’s case said that a predicate offence is a sine qua non for the offence of money laundering.
But the Supreme Court in February this year observed that “Cash travels faster than light,” and stressed the need for a fast investigation if the Enforcement Directorate (ED) comes across an intelligence input indicating huge illegal money laundering.
A bench headed by Justice A M Khanwilkar, dealing with a batch of petitions concerning the interpretation of certain provisions of the PMLA, referred to a situation saying if ED gets actionable input of illegal money transaction and asked whether it should wait for registration of an FIR by police or other agencies for the predicate offence before swinging into the action to probe the money laundering.
“Cash travels faster than light. The evidence may vanish quickly if the agency (ED) waits for registration of the FIR (for predicate offence),” observed the bench which also comprised justices Dinesh Maheshwari and C T Ravikumar.
The bench again referred to its question of whether the Enforcement Directorate will have jurisdiction to probe the unaccounted money under PMLA in the absence of a prior FIR registered for the predicate offence.
Under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), ED registers an ECIR (enforcement case information report) to probe the laundering of proceeds of a crime, committed prior, for which an FIR is already there. The court has reserved its judgement on these petitions which have challenged the validity of certain provisions of the PMLA.