ON THE BLACK SCENT TRAIL

KANPUR I-T RAIDS

- Ashish Misra

It looked like a scene from the Ajay Devgn movie Raid, just that it was happening 80 km from Lucknow, in Kanpur. On December 23, a team of the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI), Ahmedabad, raided the house of Piyush Jain in the city’s Anandpuri locality. Piyush, 51, is a manufacturer of chemical compounds used for flavouring in the pan masala industry.

The DGGI officials had raided the house as part of a swoop on gutka manufacturers in a tax evasion case, when they realised that some of the walls were not quite aligned with the structure of the 3,000-plus sq ft mansion. In fact, they felt hollow.

When the walls were broken down, bundles of currency notes, packed in paper and polythene, tumbled out. Soon, there were so many bundles that officials had to requisition 17 counting machines to invoice the evidence. Eighty steel boxes and a container were needed to shift the money. The final tally: Rs 177.45 crore in cash. Another Rs 17 crore in cash, along with 23 kg of gold and sandalwood oil worth Rs 6 crore, were recovered from the family’s ancestral house on Jain Street in Chhippatti, Kannauj. Piyush was arrested under Sections 132(1) of the IPC and 69 of the Central GST Act. Sources at the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) say the seizure could be a record for the agency.

Indian Revenue Service officer Vivek Prasad, currently with the DGGI, is reportedly the brain behind the successful operation. Prasad had in 2019 exposed the Rs 400 crore ITC (input tax credit) scam in Gujarat’s Kandla Port. He had earlier done stints in Kanpur and Lucknow and was quite familiar with the goings-on in the pan masala business.