“In India, who needs 'Money Heist' fiction, when you have the Congress Party, whose heists are legendary for 70 years and counting!” This is what Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to say on the raids on Congress Rajya Sabha MP Dhiraj Sahu in Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Jharkhand. In what could be one of the largest Income Tax seizures in the country, raids on distilleries related to Congress leader Dhiraj Sahu in Odisha have yielded Rs 340 cr. The haul was so huge that the IT department had to deploy 50 bank employees to count the cash.
The raids on distillery raids that started on December 9 belonged to Boudh Distillery Private Limited, owned by Sahu who is a Congress MP from Jharkhand. In the over 120-hour raid at Jain's Kanpur house, teams of the Income Tax Department, Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC), and Goods and Services Tax intelligence (GST) units, recovered cash to the tune of over Rs 353 crore in addition to several kilograms of gold and silver. Cash tumbled out of sofas, walls, ceilings and even the staircase.
The teams found 18 lockers in a cellar at Jain’s ancestral house in Kannauj. They also found a bunch of around 500 keys which were used to open these lockers. Jain ran perfume-manufacturing units in Kannauj and Kanpur. The money was allegedly linked to the dispatch of goods via fake invoices and without e-way bills by a goods transporter.
According to his affidavit filed with the Election Commission in 2018, Sahu’s total assets stand at Rs 34 crore and he has liabilities worth Rs 2 crore with an annual earning of Rs 1 crore.
According to a report in ToI, during the counting of the currency, done at the nearest State Bank of India branches in Odisha, over 50 counting machines were used. The report says that while counting, many machines even broke down.
Facing ire of the BJP over the seizures, Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh said, "The Indian National Congress is in no way connected with the businesses of Dhiraj Sahu, MP."
"Only he can explain, and should explain, how huge amounts of cash have been reportedly unearthed by the I-T authorities from his properties," Ramesh added. Meanwhile, Congress leader Manickam Tagore in a series of tweets on Saturday hit back at the Prime Minister, saying, "Why is the Prime Minister doing this cheap politics by linking the business of the Sahu family with the Congress?” Tagore also said that Sahu's business group needs to explain about the cash seizure.
"Some facts about Dhiraj Sahu. The Sahu family has been in the country liquor business for 40 years. Sahu’s relatives have a big liquor business in Odisha. Baldev Sahu and Group of Companies is originally from Lohardaga district of Jharkhand," Tagore said.
"Dhiraj Sahu, brother of late Shiv Prasad Sahu, who was the Lok Sabha MP from Ranchi, has been a Rajya Sabha MP for three consecutive terms. He became a Rajya Sabha MP for the first time in June 2009, and in 2018 he again got elected as MP when he declared Rs 34 crore as his worth," Manickam Tagore added.