Bhopal: The income tax department raided the residential premises of government officials, including several IAS officers, and officials of ICICI bank, a private insurance company on Thursday. The raids were conducted at 13 premises in Madhya Pradesh. The premises raided in Madhya Pradesh belonged to IAS officers Arvind Joshi and his wife Tinu Joshi (both principal secretaries), former bureaucrat MA Khan, Road and Bridge development engineer RD Chaudhary of Rajgarh, Superintending Engineer in PWD Deepak Asai, his wife Jyoti Asai (Agent of ICICI bank), ICICI bank manager Seema Jaiswal, and ICICI bank agent Bharti Bhasne, and businessmen Sunil Agrawal and Pawan Agrawal.
The documents reportedly suggest the involvement of the officials with regard to huge investments in the insurance firm. Documents revealing crore of benami property and several currency note counting machines had reportedly been unearthed as the raids continued at the time of filing this report. The IT officials had to bring currency note counting machines at the residence of IAS officials to count huge cash recovered from there. Official sources claimed that over Rs 2.60 crore cash was recovered till late night.
This is the second such crackdown on bureaucrats by the IT department. The IT department, in other raids conducted last month, had also unearthed massive irregularities in the purchase of medicines in government hospitals by secretary level IAS officers and former bureaucrats of the health department.