ED Attaches Retired AP Employee's Properties

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) provisionally attached assets worth Rs. 1.13 crore belonging to one Kondapalli Satyanarayana Rao, a retired Section Supervisor in the Kadapa Sub-Regional Office of the Employee Provident Fund Organization (EPFO), and his family members, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002, in a case of fraudulent diversion of Rs. 1.64 crore belonging to the pensioners into his personal bank accounts.

In a statement, the ED said that the attached assets were in the form of a residential flat worth Rs. 98.68 lacs and bank balances Rs. 12.64 lacs.

The agency had initiated the money-laundering investigations on the basis of an FIR registered by the CBI and the Anti-Corruption Bureau of Hyderabad, against Rao and his family members, for fraudulently diverting public pension funds into his and his close relatives' personal bank accounts.

The investigation by the ED revealed that the Bank Reconciliation Statement (BRS) data was tampered with by Satyanarayana Rao by inserting fraudulent bank account numbers and fictitious names against randomly selected Pension Payment Order numbers from the pensioners' data of pensioners who had no pension for over three years due to non-submission of life certificates, and cases involving pension-cum-arrears and other benefits.

The BRS data was downloaded through the system protocol available in the Electronic Data Processing reports, copied onto a CD and handed over to the banks without any hard copy of the summary report showing the number of pensioners and amount of pension to be disbursed, making it vulnerable to manipulation.

The data was uploaded by the bankers without any cross-verification.

Investigation further revealed that a total amount of Rs. 1.64 crore had been diverted and credited into the accounts of the accused and his close relatives between 2011 and 2014.