Raipur: Senior Chhattisgarh IAS officer Ranu Sahu has been arrested on charge of misusing the district mineral fund (DMF) by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
The bureaucrat was arrested late on Thursday and produced before the special court (Prevention of Money Laundering Act) here which remanded her to ED custody till October 22, an ED press release said.
Another senior officer of Chhattisgarh government Maya Varier was arrested by the ED on October 15 on similar charges.
The ED initiated investigation on the basis of three different FIRs registered by the Chhattisgarh police under various sections of IPC for siphoning of the exchequer money by the DMF contractors in collusion with the officials of the state government and political executives.
“This case is related to corruption and misuse of funds from the DMF in Chhattisgarh”, the ED press release said.
The IAS officer was the then district collector of Korba, Chhattisgarh, from May 2021 to June 2022 and Varier was the then assistant commissioner, tribal development department, Korba from August 2021 to March 2023 when the alleged corruption surfaced.
“During their tenure in Korba, an organised system of collection of illegal commissions from the vendors / contractors was being operated”, the ED said.
The ED investigation has revealed that the contractors have paid huge amounts of commission / illegal gratification to officials, which is to the tune of 25 percent to 40 percent of the contract value, the press release said.
“Cash used for payments of kickbacks was generated by the vendors/ contractors using accommodation entries. There is no quantification of ‘Proceeds of Crime’ in FIRs. However, ED investigation revealed that DMF fund allocated only to district Korba is more than Rs 1,000 crore from its inception till FY 2022-23 and with the prevalent rate of commission, commission amount alone in Korba is to the tune of hundreds of crore”, the press release said.
Earlier, the ED had carried out search operations in the case of government officers, vendors/ contractors and accommodation entry providers on various locations in Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra linked to DMF scam which resulted into seizure of incriminating documents, digital evidence, cash and bank balance, and jewellery amounting to Rs 2.32 crore, the press release said.
