The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Saturday registered a third FIR, naming IAS officer B M Vijay Shankar, suspended assistant commissioner L C Nagaraj and a village accountant named Manjunath in the multi-crore IMA scam.
Shankar, former deputy commissioner, Bengaluru Urban, and Nagaraj, former assistant commissioner, Bengaluru North, are accused of accepting “illegal gratification” from the directors of the IMA Group through Manjunath.
Shankar allegedly received a bribe of Rs 1.5 crore while Nagaraj got a bigger sum, Rs 4 crore, from the company that duped more than 50,000 people in the name of Halal investment schemes and wound up last June.
The state government had appointed Nagaraj as the ‘competent authority’ to investigate the business practices of the IMA Group after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) sought a report in 2018.
Shankar was Nagaraj’s boss and allegedly asked the bribe to be routed to a real estate concern through Manjunath and a director of the IMA Group. Manjunath allegedly received about Rs 8 lakh from the company, as per the FIR.
In a February 2019 report, Nagaraj gave a clean chit to the company.
The FIR came a day after the CBI raided 15 places in Bengaluru, Mandya, Ramanagara, Belagavi and Meerut (Uttar Pradesh). Besides Shankar and Nagaraj, the CBI searched the houses of Hemant Nimbalkar, former inspector general of police, Economic Offences Wing, CID; Ajay Hilory, former DCP (Bengaluru-East); E B Sridhara, former DySP, CID; M Ramesh, inspector, Commercial Street police station, and sub-inspector Gowri Shankar.
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