Tamil Nad

Senior railway official booked on graft charges

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered a case against a senior railway official and a contractor on charges of creating false records to claim bills for work not done and also to suppress losses suffered by the Railways.

Acting on source information and Railway Audit report, the CBI’s Anti Corruption Branch registered a case against Samson Vijay Kumar, deputy chief engineer (Construction), Southern Railway, Tiruchi, and Premkumar Jayaraman, railway contractor, Namakkal, on charges of criminal conspiracy and cheating. The agency also invoked provisions under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.

The allegation is that Kumar was supervising a work taken up by the contractor at Adiramapatnam station last year.

The agency charged that when Jayaraman submitted the final bill, the official asked him to add one more work worth ₹2 lakh. Knowing well that the newly added work was not carried out, Kumar demanded ₹1.5 lakh as bribe.

The contractor made a part payment of ₹50,000 as bribe through bank transfer to the account of one M.G. Gireesh in Chennai.

However, the FIR did not explain the link between the receiver and the official. A senior investigator, when contacted, said the case was based on reliable information and further investigation was on to establish the intricacies of the offence.

The CBI also included another irregularity pointed by the Railway Audit report that the official and the contractor indulged in falsification of records relating to a railway project to cover up losses to the tune of ₹1.7 crore. The documents were forged to show profit of ₹4.3 crore.

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