VIJAY DEO JHA
Ranchi, Oct 21: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has tracked certain suspicious phone calls allegedly made by Pankaj Mishra to manage tenders including a work related to Ajay barrage. An investigation is going on about whether Pankaj Mishra called a bureaucrat of the irrigation department to inquire and persuaded them to allocate the work to a company. All these phone calls were made when he was in judicial custody in the money laundering case.
The present fate of the said tender is not known which was related to the lining and renovation of the Ajay barrage situated in the Deoghar district.
But insiders have claimed that a phone call was made in the name of Pankaj Mishra and if insiders are to be believed he persuaded that the work should be allotted to a company of his choice. Notably, a highly influential functionary of the state government is said to have lobbied for the same company.
Pankaj Mishra is the MLA representative of Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren. The Ed arrested him in the illegal stone mining scam worth Rs 1000 Crore. Due to poor health, Pankaj Mishra was shifted to the RIMS-paying ward for his treatment.
ED asks RIMS to provide CCTV footage of paying wards
Meanwhile, the ED on Friday asked the RIMS administration to provide CCTV footage of the paying ward area where Pankaj Mishra is lodged. The ED wants to ascertain persons who met Pankaj Mishra at the paying ward in an unauthorized manner.
The ED took this step after it detained two of the drivers of Pankaj Mishra named Chandan Yadav Suraj Pandit for illegally providing their mobile phones to Pankaj Mishra to make phone calls. It is alleged that Pankaj Mishra was in regular touch with Sahibganj DC Ramniwas Yadav, SP Anuranjan Kispotta, district mining officer Bibhuti Kumar and many others over the phone and used to pass instructions.
Pankaj Mishra called the forest officer to pass an instruction
A senior forest official confided that Pankaj Mishra had called a forest officer of one of the districts of Santhal Pargana. “A week back Pankaj Mishra made a WhatsApp call to the forest officer. He wanted the officer to arrest someone on the charge of violating forest law. My colleague was surprised over getting a call from someone who is in jail but still exerting his undue authority. The jail was no hindrance for Pankaj Mishra to run his counters here in Sahibganj,” said the official.
