A few more post-offices in the city are under the the Central Bureau of Investigation’s scanner as officials suspect that K. Sudheer Babu, Senior Superintendent of Post Offices, fraudulently exchanged old currency notes with the new Rs.2,000 ones there as well. CBI sources revealed that there were four or five ‘layers’ of private people involved in the fraud, and that other individuals were also being questioned.
So far, the CBI has booked Sudheer Babu for illegally exchanging demonetised currency notes of Rs.500 and Rs.1000 with Rs.2000 notes to the tune of Rs.1.66 crore at the Himayathnagar (Rs.36 lakh) and Golconda (Rs.1.3 crore) post-offices. A senior CBI official said similar frauds might be unearthed, as the Postal Service official had more than 60 sub post-offices under his jurisdiction.
The official also said that so far about Rs.9 to Rs.10 lakh of cash which Sudheer Babu had exchanged had been retrieved, and that the remainder was given away to other people on whose behalf he had exchanged new notes. “It was done soon after the cash was taken from the post-offices. We got more information from him only after unearthing the frauds one by one,” he told The Hindu.
The official also said that the others who were involved in the two instances of fraud committed the crime mostly at Sudheer Babu’s behest. “The others were not really wanting to do it. The illegal exchange went unnoticed as cash did not go missing as much, but was replaced. Only the person who was replacing it in the treasury would have noticed it,” he explained.
After the first fraud at the Himayathnagar fraud was detected, for which Sudheer Babu and two others were booked, the Superintendent of Post Offices had told CBI officials that he had given the cash to a trader. But it was later found that the trader had received only a portion of the cash.
Sudheer Babu’s first malfeasance had taken place on November 12 at the Himayathnagar sub post-office, wherein two other officials had exchanged Rs.36 lakh of demonetised notes with the new Rs.2000 notes. It was detected 12 days later on November 24, when officials raided the place and found out that the amount was illegally exchanged instead of being disbursed to the public.
