Dehradun (Uttarakhand): As part of a money laundering investigation, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) said on Thursday that it had seized gold, "voluminous" documents and Indian and foreign currency worth approximately Rs 1.20 crore during raids on the residences and establishments of Congress leader and former Uttarakhand minister Harak Singh Rawat and his associates.
The ED had raided his house in a forest fraud case, it mentioned in a letter it released on Thursday. Apart from Rawat's residence, raids were conducted in Chandigarh, Delhi and Uttarakhand. The case pertains to a suit that was first brought in the Delhi High Court in 2021 by Gaurav Bansal, a wildlife activist and counsel for the Supreme Court, regarding unlawful constructions, tree chopping and buildings in the CTR. On August 23, 2021, the court ordered NTCA to investigate the matters brought forth in the petition.
In a case against Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer Birendra Singh Kandari, a "close associate" of Rawat, former DFO Kishan Chand and former forest range officer Brij Bihari Sharma, the raids were initiated on Wednesday that covered a total of 17 locations in Uttarakhand, Delhi and Haryana, the central agency said in a statement.
After being expelled from the party's primary membership and the state cabinet led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for suspected anti-party activities, Rawat joined the Congress in 2022 ahead of the Assembly elections.
A close acquaintance of Rawat, Kandari, along with Narendra Kumar Walia, allegedly organised a "criminal conspiracy" with Rawat to register two powers of attorney for land, for which the sale deed had been annulled by a court.
It stated that they had unlawfully transferred this land to Rawat's wife Deepti Rawat and a person named Laxmi Singh, on which the Doon Institute of Medical Sciences, Dehradun, was built under the auspices of the Shrimati Poorna Devi Memorial Trust.
Additionally, the ED letter claimed that they "fabricated" documents, "misused" funds under the leadership of CAMPA head and the Tiger Conservation Foundation, and led the Uttarakhand government to suffer an unjustified loss of crores of rupees. Due to suspected anomalies in the forest department, Chand and Sharma were suspended. After being detained in Delhi in December 2022, Chand was granted conditional bail by the High Court in April 2023.
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