With two more poll phases to go, cash seizures in NE up by 482%

Guwahati: The directorate of income tax (investigation) of the northeast region has made an all-time high cash seizure in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections in the region.
An official source said that seizure in last 27 days is 482% more than the total seizures in 2014 polls in the region. There is still fortnight to go for the last phase in the region.

“Cash seizures of Rs 1.21 crore were made during the 2014 Lok Sabha election by the investigation directorate. In comparison, the directorate has already seized Rs 5.84 crore between March 12 and April 8, a jump of 482%,” the source said.

This amount of cash, seized in just 27 days since the election dates were announced, is also more than 50% of unexplained cash seized in whole of 2017-18 financial year.

It also exceeds the seizure amount in entire pre-election period of the last financial year. Last polling date in the northeast is April 23.

“Since the announcement of general elections on March 12, Directorate of Income Tax (Investigation), North East Region has been on an intense intelligence and enforcement drive to counter flow of black money during elections,” an official statement said.

“Over 160 IT sleuths have been deployed at strategic locations across north east, including air intelligence teams at 12 airports. This has resulted in all time high cash seizures of unexplained money during any election period in north east,” it added.

As a first, the directorate has also initiated investigation into hundreds of suspicious cash deposits and withdrawals above Rs 10 lakh through banks across region and is being assisted by Financial Intelligence Unit of India, RBI and 68 banks in this mammoth exercise.

“The directorate is going to use ‘Big Data’ mining and analytics tools to identify high risk transactions. It is expected that investigation of these transactions may unearth substantial black money,” the statement further said.

The biggest haul so far, Rs 1.8 crore, was on April 2 at Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh. Under direction from the Election Commission, Arunachal Police have registered an FIR on cash recovery incident against a BJP candidate’s son and a former legislator from whose possession the cash was allegedly recovered.