Ranchi: Separate teams of the Enforcement Directorate on Friday morning conducted simultaneous raids across 18 locations in the country related to senior officer of Jharkhand Cadre Pooja Singhal and her close associates in connection with a Mnrega scam.
During the raids, a huge quantity of cash totaling to Rs 19.13 crore has been recovered from the home of the CA of the IAS Officer. However officially the recovery has not been confirmed. But video footage doing rounds has shown two cash counting machines being used to count the cash which has been recovered from the house of the CA.
CA of the IAS officer Suman Kumar later confessed that the cash belonged to him which he planned to show in the next financial year however from where such a huge amount came to him he could not come out with any concrete reply. Apart from the cash many important documents and papers related to investments has been also seized by the ED teams. Earlier Teams of ED early morning started their raids in Ranchi, Dhanbad and Khunti of Jharkhand, Jaipur in Rajasthan, Faridabad and Gurugram in Haryana, Kolkata in West Bengal, Muzaffarpur in Bihar and in the Delhi NCR Region.
In the state, capital raids were on in Block Number 9 of Panchwati Residency in Kanke, New Building Hariom Tower Lalpur and Pulse Hospital Bariyatu. The Pulse Hospital belongs to Abhishek Jha who is the husband of the IAS officer and apart from that raids have been also conducted at the official residence of Singhal and a location of her husband is located in Ratu Road.
Following the directions of the Jharkhand High Court in a case related to Mnrega Scam, the ED had filed an affidavit in the court through which it was informed that in Khunti district Mnrega Scam worth Rs 18.06 was executed and at that time Pooja Singhal was posted as DC Khunti. In this connection, a junior engineer Binod Prasad Sinha was arrested and sent to jail. In his statement before the ED Sinha had confessed that the commission amount use to reach the DC office.
The ED had also informed the court about cases related to Chatra and Palamu and the probe into those. Pooja Singhal was posted as DC Chatra from August 2007 to June 2008. It was alleged that she had made advance payment worth Rs 6 crore to two NGOs namely Welfare Point and Prerna Niketan for the cultivation of Musli but no work was executed and a probe was on.
Further during her stint as Palamu DC she was accused of transferring 83 acres of forest land to a private company for minning which is related to Kathotiya Coal mines and even in this case probe of the ED was on.