The anti-corruption wing of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has booked a senior official of the customs department in Mumbai for amassing disproportionate assets worth 376% more than his legal source of income.
Assistant commissioner (Central Goods and Services Tax) and former assistant commissioner of customs, Deepak Pandit, acquired expensive unaccounted residential and commercial properties in prime areas of Mumbai like Juhu, Andheri (West) and Kandivali (East).
Pandit’s wife and two sons have also been booked for helping him in the alleged crime.
According to CBI officials, the central agency initiated an inquiry against Pandit, who is posted in CGST and Central Excise in Odisha’s Bhubaneswar, based on an anonymous complaint.
Pandit is accused by CBI that he amassed disproportionate assets while working in the customs department from January 2000 to March 2014. He joined the department in 1985 as a clerk in Mumbai.
He was promoted as a preventive officer and was posted at Mumbai. He became a superintendent in 2002 and was promoted as assistant commissioner in 2014 in Mumbai. He was transferred as the assistant commissioner of GST and Central Excise, at the Appeals Commissionerate in Raigad in September last year.
The probe agency said the accused acquired properties, both movable and immovable, either in his own name or in the names of his wife Arushi Pandit and sons Ashutosh and Divyansh during his posting in the customs department in Mumbai in different capacities.
The anonymous complaint against him said that he spent lavishly during the wedding celebrations of his sons.
The agency’s first information report (FIR), HT has a copy, accuses Pandit of acquiring assets in the form bank balances, fixed deposits, mutual funds in his own name and in the names of his family members worth Rs 4,39,53,753 against savings of Rs 43,42,005.
Pandit was found to be in the possession of disproportionate assets worth Rs 3,96,11,748.
During its probe, CBI found that Pandit’s wife acquired immovable properties in her name and sold them. But she did not have any independent source of income during that time.
The agency has alleged that age properties were purchased by her for and on behalf of Pandit, CBI sources said.
Similarly, his sons bought immovable properties and gold bars when they did not have any independent source of income.
Pandit has been booked under relevant sections of Prevention of Corruption Act while his wife and two sons have been booked for abetting him in the crime.
He was probing three Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officials in the customs department who were charged with corruption in June last year. He was later transferred along with two other officials who were monitoring the inquiry.