The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday arrested a chartered accountant attached to a private hospital in Coimbatore in connection with the nationwide crackdown against officials of the Union Home Ministry’s Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) Division and others for alleged backdoor facilitation of registration and renewal of licences for NGOs to receive foreign aid.
The arrested person has been identified as Vageesh, a chartered accountant who worked with Ganga Medical Centre and Hospital Pvt. Ltd. on behalf of Ganga Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation (GOREF). The CBI produced him before a special court in Coimbatore on Wednesday.
Vageesh is the ninth accused in the First Information Report registered by the CBI against 36 accused, including FCRA Division officials, promoters/representatives of different NGOs and middlemen.
The FIR said that the first accused in the case, Parmod Kumar Bhasin, who was working with the Ministry of Home Affairs, New Delhi, and had been posted in the FCRA Division earlier, approached S. Rajasekaran of Ganga Medical Centre and Hospital Pvt. Ltd., the eighth accused in the case, on April 4 this year and informed him that the FCRA registration renewal request of his NGO, GOREF, was pending with him and the same could not be processed due to a deficiency in the annual returns documents submitted by their chartered accountant. He further said a penalty of 5% of the total amount received each year would have to be paid to process the annual returns. Rajasekaran suggested that his internal auditor, Vageesh, would contact him in this regard, the FIR said.
Vageesh contacted Bhasin, who demanded a bribe of ₹2 lakh for favourable processing of their annual returns without penalty. Vageesh informed him that he had to get approval from the management for the payment of such bribes. On April 6, Suguna Ravichandran, auditor of GOREF, who has been named the tenth accused in the FIR, approached Bhasin for negotiation and requested him to reduce the amount to ₹1.5 lakh. Bhasin reiterated his demand for ₹2 lakh and Ravichandran agreed to pay the bribe. Later, Vageesh gave a confirmation to Bhasin about the management’s approval of the payment, but in two instalments. Bhasin directed him to pay ₹1.5 lakh at the earliest and ₹50,000 after the FCRA registration renewal.
As per the FIR, Bhasin contacted Pawan Kumar Sharma, alias Pareek Bhai, of Rajasthan, whose network he used to collect bribes from various NGOs all over India. On April 7, Sharma requested Ramanand Pareek, a hawala operator based out of Chennai, to ask his counterpart in Coimbatore to accept the amount. Vageesh delivered the first instalment of the bribe to the hawala operator in Coimbatore on the same day, the FIR said.
