Lal was arrested on Tuesday and his aide was detained at 2am after the two “refused to cooperate” in disclosing the source of the huge amount of cash seized from their residence during a raid on Monday.
The ED made its submissions on the remand notice of the accused before a special court in Ranchi on Tuesday when the two were summoned.
The central probe agency said Lal was personally involved in collecting “commissions” on behalf of “some influential persons” and played a key role in managing the tenders. ED said the bribes allegedly collected from the contractors were “distributed in a mechanized manner to high-level officials in the government”.
The money laundering investigation against officials of the state’s rural development department began in 2019 and led to the arrest of the department’s former chief engineer Veerendra Kumar Ram last year.
“Ram received a ‘commission’ of 1.5 per cent and the money was distributed among his superiors and politicians,” the ED said, hinting at the possibility of questioning the minister responsible for rural development. Ram, who is currently in judicial custody, told the agency that Sanjeev Lal, secretary to the rural development minister, was directly involved in the commission collection exercise.
“The above commissions were collected by Lal through certain persons and in one of the instances, VK Ram stated that commissions worth several crores of rupees were handed over to Lal in September 2022,” ED said.
This is the second case in less than six months involving a senior congressional leader linked to huge cash transactions. Earlier, in December last year, income tax officials seized over Rs 350 crore in Odisha from a brewing company associated with Congress MP Dhiraj Sahu.
