The Enforcement Directorate (ED) said that it has provisionally attached assets worth ₹1.13 crore belonging to Kondapalli Satyanarayana Rao, a (retired) Section Supervisor in the Kadapa Sub-Regional Office of the Employment Provident Fund Organization (EPFO), and his family members under provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002.
Rao has been charged with fraudulent diversion of ₹1.64 crore belonging to the pensioners into his personal bank accounts. The attached assets are in the form of residential flat worth ₹98.68 lakh and bank balances worth ₹12.64 lakh.
The financial probe agency initiated money laundering investigations against Rao and his family members on the basis of FIR registered by CBI, Anti-Corruption Bureau, Hyderabad.
Money laundering investigation by the ED revealed that Rao tampered with the Bank Reconciliation Statement (BRS) data by inserting fraudulent bank account numbers and fictitious names against randomly selected Pension Payment Order numbers from the pensioners’ data and those who had no pension for over three years due to non-submission of life certificate and cases involving pension-cum-arrears and other benefits.
The BRS data was downloaded through system protocol available in the Electronic Data Processing reports and copied in a CD and handed over to the banks without any hard copy of the summary report showing the number of pensioners and amount of pension to be disbursed, making it vulnerable to manipulation, ED said.
The bankers uploaded the data without any cross verification. Investigation further revealed that total amount of ₹1.64 crores was diverted and credited into the accounts of the accused and his close relatives between 2011 and 2014.