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By Sumi Rajappan: A special court granted the Enforcement Directorate (ED) four-day custody of the kingpins of the Rs 2,000 crore liquor scam in Chhattisgarh. The two key accused in the case are Anil Tuteja and Anwar Dhebhar.
WHO IS ANIL TUTEJA?
Born to HL Tuteja in Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur district, the 2003 batch IAS officer is the Joint Secretary in the Department of Commerce and Industries. His family moved from West Punjab to Chhattisgarh during partition and has an ancestral business of property dealings and money lending. His wife, Meenakshi Tuteja, owns a premium line of beauty salons in Bhilai and Raipur, primarily set up to turn black money into white, according to the ED.
Anil Tuteja’s son, Yash Tuteja, has also been named as an accused along with 12 others, including Saumya Chaurasiya and Anwar Dhebhar, in a 997-page-chargesheet filed by the Income Tax Department in November 2022 in Delhi’s Tiz Hazari Court.
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Investigating agencies have found incriminating WhatsApp chats between Yash and senior IAS officials, they said.
These chats had Yash instructing senior administrative officials to follow his orders. Similar chats have been found on the WhatsApp chats of Anil Tuteja, Saumya Chaurasia, and Anwar Dhebhar. Sensitive and highly confidential information found from the chats has been submitted in an envelope to the Supreme Court.
Anil Tuteja is also a prime accused in the Rs 36,000 crore Nagrik Apurti Nigam, or NAN, scam that tainted and dethroned the former Raman Singh government in the state.
In 2018, when Bhupesh Baghel formed the government, Tuteja began getting close to him and eventually became thick with Baghel. According to highly-placed sources, he currently enjoys a commanding influence in the Chief Minister’s Office as well.
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Two years back, when an SIT was constituted by the state government to probe the NAN scam, Tuteja and another key accused, Alok Shukla, played pivotal roles in finalizing the names for the committee. Unprecedentedly, every investigative report in the case would pass through Tuteja.
The Chhattisgarh High Court granted anticipatory bail to Tuteja in the NAN scam in 2020, in which the ED filed a case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act based on the chargesheet filed by the EOW and the ACB.
Tuteja is set to retire this year. However, the contractual post of principal secretary has already been approved by the Chhattisgarh cabinet for Tuteja. With the ED arresting him, this seems like a distant dream now.
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