NEW DELHI: According to official sources on Sunday, the cash seizure in the income-tax department‘s searches against an Odisha-based distillery company has surpassed Rs 300 crore and is now the “highest-ever” such haul in a single action carried out by any probe agency in the nation. Sunday marked the start of the fifth day of the extensive raids against Boudh Distillery Private Limited, its promoters, and others. The taxman began the raids on December 6 in response to allegations of “off-the-book” transactions and tax evasion. According to the sources, cash worth over Rs 300 crore has been counted thus far, and the process is still ongoing. The department thinks that the whole money cache is “unaccounted” revenue that the business group, distributors, and others made from the cash sales of country spirits. According to the sources, this is the largest cash seizure that a government agency has ever carried out in the nation as part of a campaign against a single group and organisations connected to it. A few of the high-value seizures from the past include one in 2019 when the GST Intelligence raided a businessman in Kanpur and seized cash worth Rs 257 crore, and another in July 2018 when the I-T department discovered cash worth Rs 163 crore while conducting searches against a road construction company in Tamil Nadu. The department is also recording the remarks made by executives and other employees who were at the searched locations, and it will shortly send out summonses to the company’s principal backers to record their statements as well. The department also searched Dhiraj Prasad Sahu, the Congress leader from Jharkhand’s Rajya Sabha representative, as well as other locations in Ranchi. The quantity of money and other records taken from Sahu’s home was unclear. When asked about the action being taken against them, neither the MP nor the company responded. Union Tourism Minister G Kishan Reddy attempted to ascertain on Sunday why Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Congress party, has not spoken out regarding the seizure of millions of rupees from locations purportedly connected to his MP during these searches by the IT department.
