IAS Officer Tries to Bribe His Way Out of Corruption Case. Gets Caught Again

NEW DELHI: A senior IAS officer from Chhattisgarh, BL Aggarwal, has been arrested for allegedly paying a bribe of Rs 1.5 crore to fix a case against him. The case - of him allegedly accepting 45 lakhs as bribe -  is around 10 years old and is being heard at Chhattisgarh, said officials of the Central Bureau of Investigation or CBI.

Mr Aggarwal, the Chhattisgarh government's principal secretary in-charge of the higher education department, had already paid part of the bribe in cash, and gold. As part of this deal, Mr Aggarwal was to get 2 kg of gold delivered to the middleman's contact. Also, he had already handed over Rs 45 lakh to a hawala dealer at Raipur earlier this month, the CBI said.

The 1988-batch IAS officer has been in and out of trouble over the last decade, officials said.

He has been raided twice by the Income Tax Department in 2008 and 2010 - the officials claiming that they had come across wealth to the tune of crores but there wasn't enough evidence for a criminal investigation. He was suspended in February 2010 but he was back in the job within four months.

But it was the much older health scam pending from 2005-06, that continued to haunt him. Mr Aggarwal - who was promoted as a principal secretary a few years ago - wanted the CBI to wrap up this case and reached out to the middlemen, who, he was told, wielded influence over top government functionaries.

Mr Aggarwal is the second IAS officer to be booked for corruption in over a week. Odisha officer Partha Sarathi Mishra was caught by the state's vigilance bureau last Thursday with more than Rs 2 lakh in cash. He was arrested when he could not explain the source of the money.

The vigilance department is also trying to figure out if Mr Mishra - who was promoted to the IAS from the state civil services - could be charged with holding assets disproportionate to his known sources of income.