{"id":500039,"date":"2024-01-27T17:19:56","date_gmt":"2024-01-27T11:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/?p=500039"},"modified":"2024-01-27T19:39:43","modified_gmt":"2024-01-27T14:09:43","slug":"chhattisgarh-bhupesh-baghel-ed-fir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/india-news\/chhattisgarh-bhupesh-baghel-ed-fir\/","title":{"rendered":"Enforcement Directorate FIR names 4 IAS officers among 105 named in corruption case against Bhupesh Baghel regime \u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>By Neeraj Mishra<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>An FIR of unusual proportions has been registered by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB)\u00a0of Chhattisgarh and the complainant is the Enforcement Directorate (ED). The FIR is perhaps the biggest indictment of any government in the history of corruption in the country considering the complainant is the ED which has provided all possible evidence of corruption against the Bhupesh Baghel government. The FIR was finally registered on January 17 after the Baghel government had blocked it during its tenure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Former chief secretary and adviser to Baghel, Vivek Dhand leads the procession of worthies named by the ED. The entire list of\u00a0105 names includes four IAS officers close to Baghel who were in-charge of coal mining and transportation in various capacities and his most important ally and OSD Saumya Chaurasia. Two out of 13 ministers in the Baghel cabinet and seven MLAs have also been named as has the\u00a0Excise Commissioner and the owners of every brewery and distillery in the state. State Congress unit treasurer Ramgopal Agarwal and general secretary Vinod Tiwari and lastly at least five known scammers masquerading as businessmen close to Baghel find space in the list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Apart from Dhand, the four IAS officers are Ranu Sahu, Sameer Bisnoi, N. Das and Anil Tuteja. The MLAs past and present are Shishupal Sodhi, Devendra Yadav, Amarjeet Bhagat, Brihaspat Singh, Chandradev Rai, Gulab Kamro and Kawasi Lakhma. Of these Lakhma and Bhagat were Cabinet Ministers. The distilleries are Chhattisgarh Distillery, Welcome Group and Bhatia Wines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To take you back a little, the ED has been investigating two major scams in Chhattisgarh over the past two years. It concluded that the coal scam involving 35 officers and traders was worth about Rs 2000 crore a year. Its Excise Scam investigations revealed an even bigger figure of\u00a0 Rs 5000 crore involving 70 plus accused. The Supreme Court however had granted the accused in the excise scam a stay against PMLA prosecution since there was no predicate offence on which the ED had based its case. The ED belatedly tried to register a case in Noida involving bottlers but it did not pass muster with the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This became a shield for the excise scam accused as they all obtained bail from various courts. The mining scam accused, however, continue to be in jail. Prime among them are Chaurasia, Sahu and Bisnoi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ED had then turned towards the state ACB six months ago with all the evidence of corruption it had collected in its investigation. This also included evidence given to it by the Income Tax department. The Baghel government, under whom the ACB was then, refused to register the case. Now that the Vishnudev Sai government is in power two cases number 3 and 4\/2024 have been registered. Ironically, the department is still run by retired DGP DM Awasthi who had been given re-appointment on a contractual basis by the Baghel government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The FIR is perhaps the biggest indictment of any government in the history of corruption in the country considering the complainant is ED which has provided all possible evidence of corruption against the Bhupesh Baghel government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":500042,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Enforcement Directorate registers FIR against ex-Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel \u00a0","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1497,125714],"tags":[61622,612,306],"yst_prominent_words":[],"ppma_author":[140543],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/d2r2ijn7njrktv.cloudfront.net\/apnlive\/uploads\/2024\/01\/27171653\/bhupesh.webp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"authors":[{"term_id":140543,"user_id":4,"is_guest":0,"slug":"apnnewsdesk","display_name":"APN Live","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/478eacb893eda88aa6ed8d99b005bf58?s=96&r=g"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500039"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500039"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=500039"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=500039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- html is corrupted -->