It took the CBI 15 hours to count the Rs27 crore cash recovered from the premises of promoters of RK Associates and Brandavan Food Products, accused in the Rail Neer scam, even though the agency employed 30 people, including an RBI team and three currency note counting machines.
“The counting began on Friday midnight and ended at 3 pm on Saturday. Many of us had never seen so much currency in a single search operation,” said a CBI official.
The money was stashed in bags, trunks, cupboards and inside sofa sets. “An RBI team joined the counting exercise on Saturday morning and they also checked whether the currency notes were genuine or fake,” officials said.
The CBI had on Friday conducted searches on the premises of two former Chief Commercial Managers (PS and catering) MS Chalia and Sandeep Silas, RK Associates’ chief Shyam Bihari Agrawal and his sons Abhishek and Rahul, who are directors of Brandavan Associates.
Most of the cash was recovered from the two premises of Shyam Bihari Agrawal and his sons in upscale New Friends Colony. Fake currency worth Rs4 lakh was also found, CBI sources said.
Apart from the Agrawals, cash worth Rs1 crore was recovered from the office of RK Associates’ CEO and Rs52 lakh from his residence. During the searches, the cash was found to be stashed in 27 trunks and bags besides a number of cupboards. CBI sources said the fraud in supply of cheap packaged drinking water instead of the mandatory Rail Neer brand was being perpetrated from 2012 onwards.
CBI sources said Shyam Bihari Agrawal was a small-time businessman from Chhattisgarh and his fortunes changed after he started contracting Railway tenders for catering in premium trains like Rajdhani and Shatabdi besides superfast trains from 2004 onwards. Agrawal’s firms now have an annual turnover of Rs500 crore.
Sources said the cash was utilised by the Agrawals to purchase prime plots in Noida, Ghaziabad, Navi Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Raipur for construction of luxury hotels. Apart from the alleged fraud in catering services, the Agrawals also indulged in under-representing revenue generated from their business with the Railways.
Silas, a 1983-batch Indian Railway Accounts Service officer, collected huge amounts of unaccounted for money from businessmen like the Agrawals in the name of societies and NGOs. Silas had also served as Private Secretary to Union Ministers Oscar Fernandes and Ambika Soni during the UPA regime, the sources said.
Documents recovered during the searches also reveal that Chalia had amassed highly disproportionate movable and immovable assets. The agency also suspects that the Agrawals were involved in hawala transactions for their land deals across different cities.
The agency has also booked Satyam Caterers Pvt ltd, Ambuj Hotels and Real Estates Pvt ltd, PK Associates, Sunshine Pvt ltd and Food World who are suspected to have minted huge amounts of money by supplying cheap packaged drinking water and poor quality meals in premium trains, the sources said.
Meanwhile, the Railways on Friday suspended both Silas and Chalia for their alleged involvement in the fraudulent supply of cheap packaged drinking water in premium trains.