Raipur: On the information of 100 crore hawala trade, Income Tax Department sleuths raided four premises of hawala operator in capital city Raipur and seized Rs 6 crore unaccounted cash.
The raids were carried on the premises of Hawala trader on Monday on the specific actionable intelligence input and seized Rs 6 Crore unaccounted cash, an Income Tax Department press release said on Thursday.
However, according to sources the raid was carried on the premises of Shrishti Steel, Karsan tower Devendra Nagar, Gayatri Nagar, VIP State, and Awanti Vihar. The couple who were detained in the raid used to sleep over the mattress made of currency notes.
The Income Tax Department release said that a set of people were involved to carry out substantial amounts of hawala transactions on outside-the-books.
The modus operandi involved not only giving accommodation entries of sale, purchase etc to people, but also transportation and end-use facilitation of unaccounted money, the communique said.
During the course of the search, unaccounted cash amounting to approximately Rs 6 crore has been seized and a number of digital devices in the form of a computer hard disc and pen drives having details of hawala transactions have been seized, the communique added.
Preliminary estimates suggest that hawala transactions exceeding Rs 100 crore may be involved, further investigations are under progress, the IT department said.
