A Delhi court on Friday granted bail to journalist Upendra Rai, who was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for alleged involvement in dubious financial transactions. Rai was arrested in May this year by the CBI for alleged dubious transactions running into crores through his bank accounts and for holding an airport security pass that he was not authorised to possess.
The CBI had registered two FIRs against Rai. In one FIR, he was booked for extortion and criminal conspiracy for allegedly accepting money from a real estate company in Mumbai after promising to bail it out of its tax troubles.
In the second FIR, the central probe agency has alleged that in 2017-18 alone, Rai’s bank accounts saw transactions of over Rs 100 crore. Some of these transactions, the CBI has claimed, indicate “pumping of tainted/ill-gotten money into the system”.
Recently, a probe conducted by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) found that the activities of the journalist were flagged way back in 2010. While conducting searches at various locations, the agency recovered a note written by a senior ED official in 2010 flagging Rai’s activities to the then CBI director. Also Read: ED gets sensitive info in searches at premises of journalist, aides
The agency had also recovered call records of an ED officer, and a joint secretary in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, and legal papers relating to jailed engineer Yadav Singh, and the Moin Qureshi case, in which former CBI director A P Singh is being probed.
The recoveries also include income tax assessment orders of various companies and Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) of nearly 140 firms generated by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) after joint CBI-ED searches on the premises of Rai and his associates including Rahul Sharma and Sanjay Snehi.
(With ENS Inputs)