In a dramatic turn of events, the ED on December 3 had intensified its action against money laundering by conducting raids across cities. The operation is at the center of a high-profile investigation that involves Sanjeev Hans, a 1997 batch Indian Administrative Service officer, and ex-Rashtriya Janata Dal MLA Gulab Yadav, both of whom are in judicial custody since October 18.
The raids unraveled a Demat account with shares worth Rs 60 crore traced to a family member of one of Hans’s close associates. The modus operandi of parking illicit wealth in Demat accounts may have initially appeared intelligent, as it lets the money avoid active trading, thus evading scrutiny. However, this illusion of ED’s investigation unraveled the hidden assets which had been kept safe from the eyes of the law.
The investigating agencies also traced more than 70 bank accounts, allegedly operated and utilized to route the proceeds of crime. As many as Rs 18 crore worth of real estate investment also came under the ED radar, with large cash transactions indicating deliberate acts of money laundering and concealment of its origin. Cash amounts of Rs 16 lakh and Rs 23 lakh were seized by ED from different locations, besides physical and digital evidence of corrupt acts.
The ED investigation shows how complex and ever-changing money laundering schemes are. However strict the scrutiny may be, one thing remains clear: the watchful eyes of the regulatory agencies are always there.
It goes without saying that the ED’s probe insinuates a web of corruption taken up by Hans, allegedly amassing wealth through ill-gotten means during his tenures in key roles taken up in the Bihar government and central services. These charges revealed Yadav and other associates play their role in laundering Hans’s illicit gains, while various private individuals were also blamed for facilitating these financial activities.
Curiously, the probe did not begin with financial misappropriation but with a rape case filed by a woman lawyer against Hans and Yadav in January 2023. The FIR mentioned that they raped her at a Pune hotel in 2017, blackmailed her, and threatened her life. The complainant said she was forced to have an abortion but gave birth in 2018, seeking a DNA test for paternity.
The rape charges were quashed by the Patna High Court in September, but the FIR triggered a wider probe. ED, suspecting there was more to the story, found financial irregularities aplenty: suspected hawala transactions. In July-August searches at Patna, Delhi, Pune, Haryana and Punjab, there were found complex webs of alleged financial improprieties linked to Hans’s chairmanship-cum-managing directorship of the Bihar State Power Holding Company Limited. The fallout was swift; Hans was removed from his post as the government tried to contain the aftershocks.
What started as a case of alleged rape spiraled into a major exposé on corruption, proving that when the surface cracks, the hidden truths often emerge. This unfolding drama, with staggering figures and intricate schemes, is a sobering reminder that in the world of black money, the ingenuity of cover-ups is only rivalled by the resolve of those who seek to bring it into the open.
Hans, once a respected bureaucrat, now finds himself at the center of a scandal that questions the integrity of the very bureaucratic framework he represented. Despite supposed checks and balances, the extensive network of corruption he allegedly navigated remained concealed until the ED’s intervention.
This situation brings serious questions about the effectiveness of internal oversight mechanisms into sharp focus, pointing to a system so wrapped in opaqueness that external agencies often become the last recourse to expose wrongdoing, further denting public trust in the bureaucracy.
