New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) Thursday carried out searches at properties of senior officials of the Bihar government and seized huge amounts of unaccounted cash in connection with an ongoing money laundering investigation against IAS officer Sanjeev Hans.
The searches were carried out simultaneously at premises linked to an officer of the Bihar Administrative Service and engineers working with building construction, urban development and health departments, in Patna. The ED officers had taken currency counting machines and recovered cash amounting to Rs 11 crore.
Additionally, two officials of Bihar Medical Services & Infrastructure Corporation Limited (BMSICL) also faced action.
Thursday’s action came after the names of these officials surfaced during interrogation of Patna-based ‘middleman’ Rishu Shree in a money laundering probe against Hans, who now remains suspended.
Sources aware of the development said that while the ED has written to the Bihar home secretary to lodge a case against Shree after his role surfaced in Hans’ case, the Bihar Police are yet to file a case against him.
It was earlier last week that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had approved prosecution of Hans in the money laundering case, sources aware of the development told ThePrint.
Once a top bureaucrat in the Nitish Kumar-led Bihar government, Hans was arrested in October last year on the charges of amassing assets disproportionate to his income and recouping kickbacks from the companies favoured in contracts through his friends and batchmates.
In December, ThePrint reported that the ED estimated that the 1997-batch IAS officer amassed assets around Rs 100 crore, including around Rs 60 crore from an electrical infrastructure firm, which inked a Rs 3,300 crore contract with Bihar State Power Holding Company Limited. This, it was alleged, when Hans was the BSPHCL chairman and managing director.
The ED had filed a prosecution complaint against Hans, his batchmate from IIT-Delhi Vipul Bansal, former Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) MLA Ghulab Yadav, two of his aides and former vendors named Pushpraj Bajaj and Praveen Chaudhary in the energy and water resources department and a middleman in December 2024.
The ED’s case initially stemmed from an first information report (FIR) filed by the Bihar Police on the complaint of an Allahabad High Court lawyer, who had accused Hans and Yadav of raping her on multiple occasions. The Patna High Court, however, quashed the FIR.
In a related development, the Bihar government’s special vigilance unit had filed another case of disproportionate assets against Hans based on the information shared with them by the ED.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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