Andhra Pradesh: Four arrested in CM Relief Fund scam

Vijayawada: The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) said in a statement here on Wednesday that four persons, Ch Subrahmanyam, office subordinate of the CMRF in the Secretariat, Soka Ramesh, office subordinate in the revenue section of the Secretariat, Ch Murali Krishna associated with Ch Subrahmanyam and Kondepudi Jagadeesh Dhanaraj alias Nani, who claimed to be PA to the MLAs, were arrested in connection with the misappropriation of the Chief Minister's Relief Fund. All the accused would be produced before the ACB court, Vijayawada.

The statement said that the CMRF office came to know that during 2016 one Lakshmaiah Yadav of Proddutur siphoned off CM Relief Fund by submitting fake medical bills under different names and a criminal case was also registered against him at Simhadripuram police station in 2Ol7.

Following that, the special officer to the chief minister directed the CMRF staff to examine in detail the data of processed files available with CMRF since 2014 with a view to identify and eliminate the scope for corruption or malpractices.

The CMRF team noticed certain discrepancies like sanctioning of excess amount rather than the amount specified in the medical package, similar phone number mentioned in several applications, mentioning of similar diagnoses in the applications, no hospital inpatient/admission numbers, some claims stating that the treatment was taken at Chennai and Bengaluru-based hospitals, the ENT hospitals admitting road accident cases in the previously sanctioned data from 2O14, fraudulently access into the CMRF website by way of theft of login credentials of others.

The CMRF staff identified 88 suspicious medical claims in which Rs 1.81 crore was sanctioned and an amount of Rs 61.68 lakh in respect of 35 medical claims was credited. Due to the timely intervention of CMRF officials the crediting of Rs 1.20 crore in respect of the remaining 53 medical claims was stopped.

On the complaint given by the CMRF officials, a case was registered at ACB range office, Guntur and investigated. During the course of the investigation, the investigation made so far disclosed that the corruption and malpractices have occurred since 2Ol4 and the CMRF and the CMRF funds have been misappropriated to the tune of approximately Rs 60 lakh. The exact amount of misappropriation would be unearthed and the involvement of other accused in this case would be established during the further course of investigation, the ACB said.