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COVER STORY: B.P. VERMA
The Red Channel
The arrest of the CBEC chief blows the lid off a seedy
nexus between customs officials, middlemen--and women. A reflection on the
spreading rot.
By Sayantan Chakravarty
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| NEMESIS
AT LAST: Controversy never bothered Verma (left) and his son Siddharth--until
now |
Till the end of
March, B.P. Verma had everything going for him. A job as head of India's
customs and excise empire that many would pay a ransom for; a four-bedroom
HUDCO flat in a prize government housing colony in Delhi; and a lifestyle
that would be the envy of ordinary babus. Verma was more a part of the
Delhi elite. He was a pillar of the Indian Establishment, a status he
loved. He was fond of partying and enjoyed his drink-some say a bit too
much. He was also very sociable and befriended young women with the same
ease with which he invested his millions. He also possessed the knack
of saying the right thing at the right place. Like when he flew to London
last month to hold forth on the virtues of "work integrity"
at a seminar.
On March 31, the bubble burst with the proverbial
knock on the door. For 37 years, Verma worked himself steadily up the
bureaucratic ladder to become the chairman of the Central Board of Excise
and Customs (CBEC), carefully sidestepping allegations of corruption and
misconduct along the way.
Tragically for him, all that hard work didn't
pay that Saturday when the CBI came calling. A thorough search of his
HUDCO flat and son Siddharth's office yielded enough evidence to arrest
him a couple of days later on charges of graft, criminal conspiracy and
amassing assets far in excess of his and his family's known sources of
income. Last week, he was suspended from service. The portly Verma who
is described as "an intelligent and highly efficient officer"
by colleagues wasn't in the end clever enough to evade the CBI, an outfit
that has had an unusually good run for the past one year.
Even for a country that has become blase about
corruption in high places, Verma's arrest was sensational news. Not only
is he the highest ranking bureaucrat charged with corruption in recent
times, his is a classic case of a gamekeeper turned poacher. He was, after
all, the Government's most important revenue collector.
Verma's arrest was sensational in another way.
It coincided with a gigantic CBI operation, involving some 800 personnel,
on 60 premises of 48 customs officials who were posted in Delhi's "porous"
IGI Airport between October 1999 and August 2000. These raids were linked
to an equally sensational case of a pretty Uzbek courier of Chinese silk,
and possibly drugs and fake currency, who had made close to 70 trips to
Delhi in less than a year, breezing her way past customs and security
checks (see accompanying story).
Despite periodic photographs of proud officers
displaying their haul of contrabands, the customs has acquired an unwholesome
reputation over the years. Its so-called "lucrative" potential
came to public attention in the late-1980s when many entrants to the civil
services preferred it to the IAS. This year, the Central Vigilance Commission
has recommended penal action against 47 IRS officials. The tale of Verma
merely confirms that the rot starts from the head. Says P.C. Sharma, CBI's
special director, who has been in charge of key investigations including
Bofors, the stock-market scam and the Vincent George case: "Verma's
is a telling instance of corruption in high places. The more senior the
accused, the louder is the impact of our raids and arrests."
The CBI, however, had to wait patiently for
the right moment before zeroing in on Verma, Siddharth and a clutch of
other middlemen. Surveillance had been mounted for weeks and the agency
found that Verma was using the customs office at Chennai-one of 85 excise
and customs commissionerates in India-to dole out favours to some businessmen.
It turned out that K.K. Moolchand, owner of
A.K. Enterprises, a jewellery shop in T. Nagar, Chennai, was approached
last year by Shravan Kumar, a fellow Jain, to lend the firm's name for
an export account in the Harbour Road branch of a nationalised bank. Moolchand
obliged as he was trying to settle a divorce for which he had sought the
help of his community influentials like Kumar. But unknown to Moolchand,
Kumar used the account to draw up export documents for garments to Barbados
and other Caribbean destinations. In reality, he was dispatching rags
and receiving money against his shipments.
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