Jharkhand IAS officer grilled by ED for 10 hours in land deals case

Ranchi: IAS officer Chhavi Ranjan, who appeared before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in Ranchi, was grilled for about 10 hours on Monday in connection with its investigation into alleged illegal land deals, an official said.

Ranjan, a 2011-batch officer of the Jharkhand cadre, reached the ED office around 10.30 am and left at 8.30 pm, he said.

He was briefly questioned by the agency on April 13 as well, when searches were carried out in the case at his premises and those of some others in Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal.

The ED arrested a total of seven people, including a Jharkhand government officer, after the raids.

An assistant registrar of assurances of West Bengal government based in Kolkata has also been asked to depose on May 2, ED sources had said.

The action was taken under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), and the agency is looking at more than a dozen land deals, including one pertaining to defence land, wherein a group, including land mafia, middlemen and bureaucrats, allegedly “connived” in forging deeds and documents from as early as 1932.

Lands of the poor and the downtrodden were “usurped” as part of this fraud, the sources had said.

To launch its investigation under the PMLA, the federal agency took cognisance of a police FIR of forgery of some personal identification documents registered by the civic authorities concerned.

The agency, according to ED sources, has recovered a number of fake seals, land deeds and registry documents during the searches.

This is the second case in which a Jharkhand-cadre IAS officer has come under the scanner of the ED. Last year, it had arrested IAS officer Pooja Singhal in a money laundering case.

Meanwhile, Uday Shankar Singh, the personal private secretary of Abhishek Prasad Pintu, who is the media advisor to Chief Minister Hemant Soren, was also brought for questioning at the ED office on Monday evening.

A printer and some other documents, which were recovered from his home during a search operation on Monday, have been brought to the agency’s office, the sources added.