Top industrial houses, including steel magnate Jindal Steel Works (JSW), in Chhattisgarh confessed to have paid extortion money worth more than Rs 360 crore to Suryakant Tiwari in the name of procuring transit passes for coal and iron ore transport in during the last 3 years. The state houses more than a dozen top steel, power and mining giants including Vedanta.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has given a detailed account of the extortion of levy by coal trader-turned-kingpin Tiwari in its chargesheet filed in a Special Court in Raipur on 9 December.
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According to the ED, Tiwari, has acquired a “larger than life figure” in the current Congress dispensation owing to his proximity to chief minister’s suspended deputy secretary Saumya Chaurasia (in jail for money laundering) and some very high profile politicians.
“According to the investigation so far, the amount of collection through this method is in the tune of Rs. 360 crore”, the ED claimed in its more than 8000 page chargesheet.
Vishal Kumar Jain, of Mahaveer Energy and Coal Beneficiation Ltd, for instance, confessed to have paid illegal levy of approx Rs 7 crore to Suryakant through his associate Nikhil Chandrakar and Roshan Singh at rate of Rs. 25 per tonne of coal he transported from the mines, the chargesheet claimed.
Similarly, Sanjay Kumar Jha, a high ranking officer with the Jindal Steel Works Ispat Special Products Ltd. (JSWISPL), deposed before the agency claiming that the amount was paid for clearance of transit pass from the respective mining office and the clearance from the mining department was not released unless the said amount of Rs. 25 per tonne was paid.
Shravan Kumar Goyal, Director of Bajrang Power and Ispat even claimed that he was instructed by a top ranking mining officer from Raipur to contact Roshan Singh for clearance of transit pass in July 2020.
His peer, Sandeep Goyal, corroborated the same in his statement saying his company paid illegal levy of Rs. 25 per tonne for coal and Rs 100 per tonne for iron pellets. Officials from other major industries have also endorsed the same in their statements to ED.
The ED has so far provisionally attached movable and 91 immovable properties worth Rs 152.31 crore belonging to Suryakant Tiwari, Saumya Chaurasia, IAS Sameer Vishnoi, Sunil Agarwal & others. The properties include cash, jewellery, flats, coal Washeries and land.
The investigation agency had conducted searches at more than 75 locations including the Mining Departments at Korba & Raigarh Collectorate. Further probe by it revealed that Policy changes were made to replace an existing efficient online system of issuance of transport permits with a manual layer where coal users were forced to apply for NOC with state mining officers.
The new arrangement engendered extortion at the rate of Rs 25 per tonne of transported coal with Suryakant, as their key henchman at the ground level who deployed his employees in various regions to extort money from Coal Transporters & Industrialists.
According to ED, his team was physically coordinating with lower level government functionaries and Coal transporters & representatives of user companies.
Since his employees were spread across the State, they maintained WhatsApp groups, excel sheets of each Coal Delivery Order & the extorted amounts and shared them with Suryakant Tiwari, who in turn maintained detailed hand written Diaries of the incoming bribe amounts & their utilization for purchase of benami lands, payment of bribes, payments for political expenditure etc.
Hinting that this kind of systemic extortion was not possible without the knowledge and active participation of the State machinery, the agency said that it ran uninterrupted without a single FIR and collected around Rs 360 Crore in 2 years.
It clearly indicates that the accused persons were acting in a concerted manner at the instructions of person(s) at the highest level, having command & control over the state machinery.
The ED arrested Sameer Vishnoi, trader Sunil Agarwal, Laxmikant Tiwari and Suryakant Tiwari in October and nabbed Saumya Chaurasia in this case on December 2. Suryakant ran this syndicate and was able to coerce various government officers due to over-arching influence of Saumya Chaurasia, the agency added.
The agency is now stipulating to probe the role of politicians in coal levy extortion racket which has been hitting headlines for close to six months now.
“The role of the political executives and other senior functionaries of the Chief Minister’s Office and State bureaucracy needs to be ascertained and she (Saumya) needs to be questioned regarding their role and involvement in this extortion racket”, Special Public Prosecutor Dr. Saurabh Kumar Pandey had stated while appearing for ED in the special PMLA court Raipur.
