Jharkhand IAS officer remanded to 6-day ED custody in land deal

Jharkhand IAS officer Chhavi Ranjan, arrested by the Enforcement Directorate during a probe into alleged illegal land deals, was on Saturday sent to 6-day ED custody by a special PMLA court in Ranchi.

The agency sought 10-day custody to interrogate the former Ranchi deputy commissioner who was arrested on Thursday night after some 10 hours of interrogation.

Ranjan’s lawyer Abhishek Krishna Gupta said the 2011 batch officer of the Jharkhand cadre will again be produced on May 12. The special court had on Friday sent Ranjan to the Birsa Munda Central Jail at Hotwar. Ranjan’s statement was recoded under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Also read: Jharkhand money laundering case: ED arrests 7 after raids against IAS officer, others

The ED had on April 24 also questioned him for around 10 hours in connection with its money laundering probe into alleged illegal land deals.

Land deals

Ranjan was first quizzed on April 13 after searches at his premises and of some others in Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal. The ED, which earlier arrested seven people including a Jharkhand government officer, is investigating more than a dozen land deals.

One of these pertain to defence land wherein a group of mafia, middlemen and bureaucrats allegedly “connived” in forging deeds and documents from as early as 1932. Land parcels of the poor and the downtrodden were usurped as part of this fraud.

This is the second case in which a Jharkhand cadre IAS officer has come under the scanner of the ED. Last year, it arrested 2000 batch IAS officer Pooja Singhal in a money laundering case linked to the alleged embezzlement of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme funds and other suspicious financial transactions.

(With Agency inputs)