Engineer-in-Chief, Public Health and Municipal Engineering Department, Vijayawada, Pamu Panduranga Rao, and professor in the Andhra Medical College (AMC), Visakhapatnam, Nalli Babu Vijaya Kumar, were produced in the ACB courts in Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam respectively on Saturday.
The courts remanded both the officers to 14 days judicial custody and sent them to jail.
Panduranga Rao was arrested by the Central Investigation Unit (CIU) of the ACB on Friday for amassing over ₹120 crore illegal assets in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Vijaya Kumar was arrested for possessing disproportionate assets to the tune of ₹35 crore.
Ironically, both the officers are friends and business partners. As the banks remained closed on Saturday and Sunday, we would open the lockers of the officers on Monday to unearth some more assets of the officers, said DSP of ACB (Visakha Urban) K. Rama Krishna Prasad.
DG of ACB, R.P. Thakur, said their searches on Saturday revealed that Panduranga Rao had designated four shell companies: Sudharma Infotech Ltd, Visakhapatnam in 2008, Rajyalakshmi High Tech works, Hyderabad, in 2010, HM Technocrat India Pvt. Ltd, Hyderabad, in 2012 and Lakshmi Hanora Developers in 2013 in the name of his wife Rajyalakshmi to show black money as white.
Verification revealed that no activities were conducted in these companies since their establishment.
Net worth
The ACB officials said the net worth of the assets, including cash, gold, land holdings, houses and other investments of Panduranga Rao was put at ₹12 crore (registration value), but the market value would be in excess of ₹200 crore.
