Income Tax officials carried out simultaneous raids on five private medical colleges across the State from Thursday morning in the wake of reports of large scale irregularities in admissions and income-expenditure discrepancies in the institutions.
A senior official here told The Hindu in the evening that the searches were continuing and something might emerge only on Friday. He refused to disclose further details as other colleges would get alerted.
Reports reaching here said the raids were conducted in Visakhapatnam, Rajahmundry, Vijayawada, Kurnool and Karimnagar. In Rajahmundry and elsewhere at Amalapuram in East Godavari district, the operation was carried out by a ten-member team headed by Mr. Srinivas, Deputy Director of I-T (Investigation) in Visakhapatnam, on GSL medical college and Swatantra hospital which were run by Swatantra group of Ganni Bhaskar Rao, president of all India private medical colleges association. The team seized important documents and booked a case under the I-T Act on the institutions. The residences of father-son duo, K.V.V. Chaitanya Raju and Ravi Verma, both of whom are MLCs, were also searched in Amalapuram and Hyderabad. The officials seized documents worth Rs.45 crore, sources said.
