Money-Laundering Case Against Journalist: Call Detail Records of ED officer, Former Joint Secretary Under Probe as Fresh Raids on

Confidential communication was also part of the cache.

New Delhi, May 28: Investigations into the alleged money-laundering case against journalist Upendra Rai has taken the probe agencies by surprise as they claimed to have recovered call data records of a senior Enforcement Directorate (ED) official, an IAS officer earlier posted in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, besides confidential communication between Singapore-based Indian High Commission and a former ED chief, officials said here.

The recoveries also included income tax assessment orders of various companies and Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) of nearly 140 companies generated by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) after a joint CBI-ED search on Rai and his associates. The probe agencies, along with the Income Tax Department, conducted fresh searches in Gurgaon, Kolkata and Mumbai over the week against a number of people. The agencies have seized a confidential communication between the Indian High Commission in Singapore and former ED Director Rajan Katoch in connection with a case related to industrialist Naveen Jindal, the officials said.

A letter written by Jindal to Katoch in 2015 has also been recovered apart from a secret inquiry report of foreign assets and a note shared by a Special Director of the ED in the backdrop of the Singaporean FIU taking umbrage on the leakage of its shared information in the Indian media. The officials told PTI that documents pertaining to four IT assessment orders against Mumbai-based companies have been recovered from the premises of Sanjay Snehi, an associate of Rai who is being probed in the case.

Among other seizures made from the premises of Snehi are CDRs of a senior Enforcement Directorate (ED) officer investigating the Supreme Court-monitored Aircel-Maxis case, that of an IAS officer who served as a Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, of a journalist owning a Hindi news portal and those of Rai’s wife Rachna. The searches had more surprise for the officials when the sleuths recovered a confidential note of 2010 of an ex-ED Additional Director, now a senior officer in the Delhi Police, to the then CBI Director “complaining” about the activities of Rai. “The highly classified letter is recovered from a man who himself is the subject of discussion and question in the note. A full inquiry is on to find as to how this document was leaked to Rai,” the official said.

A total of 140 STRs, generated by the FIU to check dubious, black money and terror-financing linked transactions in the country’s economic channels, have also been seized from a pen drive found at Rai’s premises. The highly sensitive and confidential STRs, of the period between 2015-16, are largely connected to those firms which are being probed by various agencies for trade-based money laundering, black money generation and export/import frauds, including one related to the son of a former chief minister.

The ED and the CBI are probing Rai under criminal sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and the Prevention of Corruption Act respectively. He is at present in judicial custody after the CBI arrested him on charges of alleged extortion and manipulation of an Income Tax Department case against a Mumbai-bound businessman.