Assets worth Rs 12 crore found in I-T raids

PATNA: The income-tax raids on the premises of three leading doctors of Begusarai district town, 125km from here, continued for the second consecutive day on Wednesday.
Sources in I-T department said the taxmen have so far detected undeclared assets and investments worth over Rs 12 crore, and verification of seized documents is still going on. The raids are likely to continue on Thursday also.
With taxmen recovering another stash of Rs 5 lakh cash from the residence of Veena Nursing Home’s owner Dr Ramashray Singh on Wednesday, the total cash recovered from the residences of the three doctors rose to Rs 1.84 crore.
I-T officers were astonished when they found a total of 43 passbooks of different banks from the premises of Dr Nalini Ranjan Singh. On questioning, Dr Nalini could not identify a few names appearing on the passbooks, an I-T officer familiar with the raids said. He said nearly 60 bank accounts and over a dozen bank lockers of the three doctors have been frozen. The officer, however, declined to give the exact number of lockers at the current juncture of investigation.
Sources said the I-T officials also detected an investment of Rs 30 lakh in the Bhusari Cold Storage in the name of a bogus firm. On questioning, Dr Nalini accepted it as his own investment.
The raiding teams are facing an uphill task in calculating the actual income of doctors, as none of the three has maintained any book of accounts. The receipts from patients have been mentioned in simple registers, that too in coded numbers. For example, Rs 30,000 has been shown as just Rs 300.
Meanwhile, the chartered accountant who used to maintain the accounts of these doctors, has fled from the town along with family after locking his home since Tuesday. Despite their best efforts, I-T officers have so far failed to locate the ‘missing’ chartered accountant. Some of the employees of the doctors who used to maintain cash registers have also stopped coming to their nursing homes, fearing questioning, sources said.