BDA official charged in IMA case took Rs 5 crore to get a clean chit for IMA from Revenue Department

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has charged a former executive engineer in the BDA with taking a Rs 5-crore bribe from I Monetary Advisory (IMA), a so-called Halal investment company that went bust in June 2019.

The charge sheet states that P D Kumar received the bribe in four instalments during April-May 2019 to help the IMA get a clean chit from the Revenue Department.

IMA, which ran diverse businesses with its headquarters in Bengaluru, collected thousands of crores of rupees from investors, mostly Muslims, by promising them monthly, quarterly and yearly returns. It eventually went bust in June 2019 after having failed to pay the investors several months earlier.

The CBI has registered four cases in the IMA scam probe, which is being monitored by the High Court of Karnataka and has filed several charge sheets. Those charged include Mohammed Mansoor Khan, CEO and MD of the IMA group, and the directors of the company, Nizamuddin Ahmed, Vaseem, Naveed Ahmed and Nazir Hussain.

In a press statement, the CBI stated that the Rs 5-crore bribe was paid as part of a “conspiracy” hatched between Khan and Kumar after the latter assured he could influence senior officials of the Revenue Department.

Kumar assured that the Revenue Department would accept the closure report submitted by the competent authority as well as the then assistant commissioner of the Bengaluru North subdivision, the CBI said. The report was filed after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) sought details of the IMA’s business model.

The closure report was submitted to the Revenue Department in April 2019. Kumar was apparently approached because of his old contacts with senior officials of the Revenue Department. However, instead of accepting the report, the-then principal secretary of the Revenue Department sent it to the Law Department for an opinion. The principal secretary further referred the report to the state police chief for a further enquiry.

Since Kumar could not deliver what he had promised, Khan and other directors started pressuring him to return the bribe. He had allegedly returned Rs 30 lakh, as per the account books of the IMA, the CBI stated.

Kumar had also issued two cheques from his bank account — for Rs 2 crore and Rs 2.5 crore — as security until he returned the full bribe amount in cash. The CBI has not only recovered the cheques but also accessed WhatsApp chats between him and the IMA directors on the movement of the file.