Team News Riveting
Raipur, may 31
After over two and a half years, two Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers along with others walked free from the Raipur central jail on Saturday after the apex court granted bail two days ago.
The IAS officers, Ranu Sahu and Sameer Vishnoi along with state-cadre bureaucrat Soumya Chaurasia and others were behind the bars after Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested them in connection with money laundering linked to the infamous Chhattisgarh coal levy scam. The bail process was completed on Friday after the Supreme Court granted interim bail to all the accused after clubbing cases against them.
The division bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justice Suryakant and Dipankar Dutta granted interim relief to Suryakant Tiwari, Soumya Chaurasia, Sameer Vishnoi, Ranu Sahu and others accused in the scam. The apex court has however put stringent conditions that include exiling them from the state to avoid influencing the witnesses and tampering with evidence.
Vishnoi, the 2009-batch IAS officer was first to be arrested in October 2022 while Sahu, an IAS officer of 2010-batch, was arrested in July 2023. Chaurasia was arrested in December 2022.
ED had alleged that a coal scam of more than Rs 570 crore has been committed through various means including coal operations, making online permits offline. The FIR was registered against 36 people in this case. The order to make the permits available online offline to collect money from coal traders in coal transportation was issued on 15 July 2020 by the then Director of Mineral Department, IAS Sameer Vishnoi. Illegal recovery was done by forming a syndicate.
Coal trader Suryakant Tiwari was considered to be the mastermind of the entire scam. The Mineral Department used to issue peat pass and transport pass to the trader who deposited illegal money at the rate of Rs 25 per tonne with Suryakant’s employees. In this way, a total of Rs 570 crore was recovered by fraud practices. In the ED raid, first IAS Sameer Bishnoi and then coal trader Suryakant Tiwari were arrested.
The officials were released from the central jail on Saturday morning. While the media waited at the main gate, the officers and other accused were evacuated from the back door.
