Gross irregularities in lucknow collectrate treasury pointing towards another fake stamp racket surfaced during a probe under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Information Commissioner, Hafiz Usman, who confirmed of the above here on Thursday afternoon claimed to have directed to initiate a high-level probe to fix the responsibility of the officials so appropriate departmental as well as legal proceedings could be made in the matter.
It may be mentioned that few years back also, lucknow collectrate was in the news when fake stamp papers running into several hundred crores have been found to be pumped in through the vendors. The matter was then probed by sleuths of the Central Bureau of Investigation and several persons were arrested.
Reports said that an application under the RTI has been filed with the district magistrate office in lucknow in which numbers of some non-judicial stamp papers having a face value of Rs 50 has been provided and it was sought that against whose name, the stamp papers were released from the lucknow Treasury. After several reminder, the Treasury Officer of the Collectrate confirmed that the stamp papers of the given numbers (A.E—845586 and A.E – 845587) had been issued from the treasury but they had no knowledge that in whose names or the vendor, they have been issued.
It was also informed that the stamp papers were released on April 2, 2012 from double lock to single lock and later through single window, it was issued to lucknow based vendor on April 3, 2012. However, even after several efforts, the treasury failed to provide the names and had informed the complainant that they were bound to give those information under the RTI which is not present in their record.
Usman claimed that when the RTI activist not received convincing reply, he filed an appeal against the Treasury Officer in his court so he too summoned the records. He said to be shocked when he learnt through the reply that the stamp papers were released from the Collectrate Treasury without making proper entry of the recipients in their record. Usman said that though the Treasury officer claimed that the above stamp papers were not fake and were issued from the treasury but he suspected that when they had no record that whom it were issued, then same number duplicate stamps could be easily used by the vendors and that the collectrate staff is also not in the position to confirm whether they were fake or not.
Usman claimed that in wake of the above findings during investigation and also going through the gross irregularities made by the Treasury Officer, he now asked district magistrate of lucknow to direct ADM (finance and revenue) to record the statement of all the officials concerned in the matter and to appear before him within a month and submit a report so he could constitute a high level enquiry under divisional commissioner of lucknow or by some other senior government officer.