Found: Rs 30 crore demonetised notes

CHENNAI: Police on Monday seized at least 35 sacks of demonetized notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 dumped in an open ground behind a marriage hall in Puzhal. The notes, with an estimated face value of more than ?30 crore, were shredded into pieces. Police are now scanning CCTV camera footage from places in the vicinity. The place where the notes were found was not covered by cameras.

A few rag-pickers who found the sacks with the notes among mounds of garbage, alerted the police control room. A team from the Madhavaram police station rushed to the spot and found some rag-pickers trying to patch up the shredded pieces. The team members took custody of all the notes.

The vast open space where the seizure was made is between the Madhavaram flyover and the Retteri lake and for a long time has been used to dump garbage by people of the area. While some of the notes were in sacks, the rest were scattered over a area of nearly 100 sqm, said a police officer. The sacks of demonetized money are now at the Madhavaram police station.

Another police officer said the notes were a little wet which could be because they were dumped late in the night. It might be impossible to calculate the exact face value of the dumped notes, he said. “We suspect that a person or a group of people had concealed the money after demonetization came into force on November 8, 2016. They may have been waiting for things to ease a bit, or it could be hawala money,” said the officer. A case was registered and investigations begun.

This is not the first time such huge amounts of demonetized notes have been found in the city. On May 18, last year, police officers had seized a stash of demonetized notes with a face value of about ?45 crore from a businessman’s residence at Choolaimed. About a month later, on June 13, a team of Intelligence Bureau officers seized demonetized notes with a face value of Rs 2 crore from a car belonging to a lawyer. This seizure was also in the Choolaimedu area.