The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) will soon record the statement of Additional Secretary BK Prasad and other officials of the Union Home Ministry in order to unravel the larger “extortion” racket in connection with the case relating to Undersecretary Anand Joshi, who has been booked for allegedly issuing arbitrary notices to NGOs.
Sources said Prasad had lodged the complaint with the CBI against Joshi and unknown others for allegedly issuing notices to NGOs for receiving significant amount of foreign contributions. “We are planning to question several officials, including Additional Secretary BK Prasad, to get to the bottom of the racket,” the official said.
“Recording the statement of Prasad and other officials is vital to carry forward the probe into the alleged irregularities in the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) division of the Ministry. Since he is the official complainant in the mater, he will be in a position to provide clues to a number of unanswered questions relating to the alleged scam,” an official said.
While Prasad is said to have detected the alleged irregularities in the FCRA division in January this year, he lodged the complaint in May. Besides, no departmental enquiry was initiated against Joshi even after the alleged detection of the irregularities. Instead, Joshi was transferred to the coordination wing in March.
Joshi served in the FCRA division for eight years. Sources said the role of several Union Home Ministry officials has come under the scanner in the light of an “extortion” racket allegedly being run by Joshi from North Block, CBI sources said. “It is really shocking that Anand Joshi was running an extortion racket from North Block right under the nose of senior officials including the Home Minister Rajnath Singh,” an official said. The North Block also houses offices of Directors of Intelligence Bureau and CBI.
The agency suspects Joshi, who is at the bottom of the bureaucratic pyramid, was part of a bigger extortion ring. “We suspect he was possibly hand in glove with some senior officials,” the agency official said.
The Ministry’s Foreigners’ Division deals with FCRA that regulates foreign funding of NGOs.
Joshi, who has been accused of accepting bribes from several NGOs, went missing on Wednesday morning, the day he had been summoned to appear before the CBI for questioning. He left a letter to his wife Meenakshi saying he undergoing ‘severe mental harassment’ and now could not take any more pressure.
A day before his “disappearance”, Joshi had also made serious allegation against Prasad, who heads foreigners’ division, saying he was threatened by him (Prasad) to give a clean chit to some NGOs, including US-based Ford Foundation. He also claimed he was offered “crores of rupees” by his superiors to give clean chit to NGOs for clearance under FCRA. Prasad, a senior IAS official retiring on May 31, rubbished the allegation as “baseless”.
In April 2015, the Centre had put the Ford Foundation, one of the top international funding organisations, on the watch list considering national interest and security and ordered that all funds coming from the foundation to any NGOs will have to be first cleared from the Home Ministry. As parts of the crackdown on NGOs, the Centre had also cancelled the registration of nearly 9,000 foreign-funded NGOs that failed to file annual returns for three years in a row.
“In January Joshi had taken several files of NGOs to his house including one belonging to Teesta Setalvad being investigated by the ministry for FCRA violations. But we fail to understand why the complaint was registered with us last week,” a CBI official said.
“I do not understand why he is leveling charges against me. He was caught red-handed and several files related to NGOs were found from his house and that’s the reason I transferred him from foreigners’ division to coordination in March,” Prasad told reporters at his North Block office on Thursday.
Intelligence Bureau sources said the malpractice had come to light in January as Joshi had issued 60 notices “arbitrarily” to NGOs in a bid to extort money.
“But we fail to understand why the complaint was registered with the CBI only in May. There are so many unanswered questions which senior officials of the foreigners division need to explain,” an IB official said.
Meanwhile, the CBI on Thursday issued another summons asking Joshi to appear before it on Friday. The agency, however, denied that they had put pressure on Joshi and said raids and searches in his office and residence were carried out as part of the probe.
“We are unaware of his whereabouts and that is why we issued the summons again today,” said a CBI official.
On Monday the agency had claimed the searches yielded Rs 7.5 lakh in cash and some “incriminating documents” from Joshi’s Ghaziabad residence, including files relating to the ministries of Home and Information and Broadcasting.