The lokayukta police have received sanction from the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), Government of India, to prosecute the suspended IAS couple accused of amassing assets worth Rs 41 crore.
lokayukta Police got the sanction to prosecute Arvind and Tinoo Joshi on Saturday. The Joshi’s are facing cases for disproportionate assets under the Prevention of Corruption Act and Indian Penal Code.
lokayukta sources said here on Sunday that Joshi’s will be now charge sheeted. They said that besides them, 15 others including Arvind’s father HM Joshi, mother Namrata Joshi, associate SP Kohli, Delhi based stamp vendor Raj Rani, insurance agent Seema Jaiswal would be charge sheeted.
Meanwhile, special judge Alka Dubey has quashed Joshi’s application for dismissal of lokayukta police’s application for confiscation of their properties.
Both Arvind and Tinoo are 1979 batch IAS officers of the State cadre. Income Tax Department raided their official residence in Bhopal in February 2010, leading to discovery of disproportionate assets.
Notably, the Income Tax Department had claimed to have detected wealth valued at a whopping Rs 360 crore from the IAS couple Arvind Joshi and Tinu Joshi disproportionate to their known sources of income.
Departmental sources said that the biggest amount of ill-gotten money probably detected from any IAS officer in the country was unearthed following several Income Tax raids on the premises of the duo.
The first raid had yielded Rs 3 crore and a number of documents about their alleged unaccounted investments, the department claimed. Jewellery worth Rs 67 lakh and foreign currency worth Rs 7 lakh were also recovered during the raids, the department claimed.
The raids were carried out following complaints that the officers had allegedly made huge investments in an insurance company.
In a 7,000-page appraisal report submitted to Madhya Pradesh Chief Secretary Avni Vaish and lokayukta PV Naolekar, the department has given details of investments made by the Joshis.