New Delhi: Illicit cash, liquor, jewellery and other items worth over Rs 115 crore allegedly meant to influence the Karnataka Assembly elections have been seized in the state since March 27.
The Election Commission, Income Tax department, police and flying squads have posted several teams with statutory powers and sufficient resources in each district of the state, the EC said in a note on Monday.
Drawing a comparison between the figures during the 2013 election with the upcoming elections, the EC said that the cash haul is almost five times more this time while jewellery seizures have also gone up.
The Income Tax department has seized cash worth Rs 19.69 crore and jewellery worth Rs 4.81 crore as on April 30, 2018. In 2013, it was Rs 4.97 crore in cash and Rs 3.41 crore worth of jewellery.
Till April 29, flying squads, SSTs and other police authorities seized cash worth Rs 41.48 crore, 4,64,172.622 litres of Indian-made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) and other liquor worth Rs 21.69 crore.
The Election Commission further said that the IT department has been conducting intensive surveillance and monitoring work in the state ahead of the elections.
Listing out four major recent search operations, the EC note said that the major searches were conducted in Mysore on April 24. Several other operations were conducted in Mysore, Devanagari and Bangalore from April 26-28. The third search was done in Bangalore on April 28-29 and a fourth in Khanapur, Hubballi and Bangalore. Major parties raided include government contractors.
Several government contractors were raided in Mysore and Rs 6.76 crore of unaccounted cash was seized in denominations of Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 notes. The bulk of the seizures were made from lockers under benami names, the EC said.
The second raid was conducted against one contractor each in Bangalore, Mysore and Devangere. In one of them, Rs 4.08 crore cash was seized and Rs 2.79 crore worth gold jewellery. In another case, Rs 1.2 crore was found in a moving car. Notably, evidence seized showed inflated purchases, bogus sub-contractor and labour payments and unaccounted cash payments.
In the third raid, intelligence inputs said a person was financing certain candidates and a 32-hour search was conducted at two business premises and one residential property linked to this person.
Cash worth Rs 3.18 crore was seized, the EC said, adding Rs 2 crore was found in a car parked alongside the residence.
The fourth raid was conducted on a candidate contesting the upcoming elections after his affidavit showed some discrepancies. It was found that he had not mentioned the properties of some of his family members out of which 3 were GPAs and two were purchased. He had valued the properties declared in his affidavit at Rs 191 crore and each of these declarations are under scrutiny.
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