A team from the Navi Mumbai Police Crime Branch will visit Visakhapatnam to investigate the case of forgery registered by the Board of Radiation and Isotope Technology (BRIT) against a firm in the Andhra Pradesh city.
The case was registered with the APMC police last week, after the BRIT found the firm had exported goods to Bangladesh with a forged testing certificate. It has been transferred to Crime Branch, Unit I.
“It is not clear if the forgery was done by the firm or if it was cheated by someone who posed as an agent,” Tushar Doshi, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Crime Branch, said.
The BRIT, which comes under the Department of Atomic Energy, is located at Sector 19 in Turbhe and is responsible for issuing radioactivity test certificates to goods that are exported.
How it unravelled
The alleged forgery by Codex Biosciences International Private Limited came to light when Deepak NextGen Foods and Feeds Pvt Ltd, a firm based in Vemuluru, approached the BRIT seeking a certificate. As a template for the certificate it was seeking, the Vemuluru firm had attached a copy of a radioactivity testing certificate sent to M/s Nehal Resources Pvt Ltd in Dhaka, Bangladesh, allegedly issued by BRIT.
“The certificate said it was provided to the Bangladeshi company by the Visakhapatnam firm, which exports fish and shrimp feed supplements. The complainant, Jaychandran Govindan Narath, officer in charge of Radioanalytical Laboratory in Vashi, found that his signature was fraudulently used on the certificate along with a fake BRIT stamp, under the letterhead of Government of India. The forged certificate also had a different font,” police inspector Sandeepan Shinde from Unit I said.
Mr. Shinde said the police need to verify if the products exported with the forged certificate were rejected goods. “Our team will go to Visakhapatnam this week to investigate further.”
The accused have been booked under sections of cheating and forgery of the Indian Penal Code, along with Section 29 of the Atomic Energy (Radiation Protection) Rules, 2004.