Lucknow, 12 April: The Income Tax department has uncovered benami assets worth Rs 100 crore belonging to incarcerated criminal Mukhtar Ansari and is in the process of attaching roughly 23 of them.
Mukhtar Ansari, who was imprisoned in UP’s Banda jail under the Gangster Act, was sentenced to ten years in prison by a court in Uttar Pradesh in December last year.
About 60 criminal charges, including land grabbing, murder, and extortion, have been filed against him.
According to reports, the I-T department has begun ‘Operation Panther’ to probe Mukhtar Ansari’s properties valued about Rs 100 crore. The operation entailed identifying and tracing all properties acquired in the names of various gang members and associates who were either directly or indirectly related to Ansari.
Dhruvpurari Singh, Additional Commissioner of Income Tax, Benami Wing, headed a team that conducted attachments and ground investigations on benamidars – those who hold property on behalf of others – related to Mukhtar Ansari. The team also followed the money trail in other transactions in which land plots worth crore were transferred and registered to benamidars without paying a single paisa.
Agencies have discovered that an attachment order was issued on April 11, for a property tract worth around ?12 crore in the name of Ganesh Dutt Mishra in the Tehsil of Ghazipur. Mishra, Ansari’s close friend and neighbour in Ghazipur, was in charge of all of Ansari’s real estate enterprises.
The cheque numbers given for the acquisition of the aforementioned land piece were never deposited or encashed, showing that it was a fraudulent deal carried out in the name of benamidar Ganesh Dutt Mishra for Mukhtar Ansari, according to Deputy Commissioner of Income Tax Alok Kumar Singh.
The Income Tax agency also uncovered that in 2014, Ansari’s father-in-law’s firm, Aagaz Project and Construction Ltd, obtained a loan of ?1.6 crore from a nationalised bank using a property belonging to Ganesh Dutt Mishra as collateral. The company’s directors include Ansari’s wife and son, demonstrating Mishra’s close relationship with Ansari and that he worked for him as a benamidar.
About 20 similar properties have been uncovered as part of the ongoing ‘Operation Panther’ in Ghazipur and other places, where prime land tracts were purchased in the names of gang members working for Ansari. The probe has thrown light on the vast network of benamidars and the unlawful purchase of public properties.
