Police under watch in stamp scam

The arrest of a very senior police officer, Sridhar Wagal, Inspector General, Maharashtra, in the nationwide fake stamps case has sent shockwaves across the city, with more arrests expected in the next few weeks.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the Rs30-billion scam also questioned Mumbai Commissioner of Police R.S. Sharma yesterday to find out whether he had any role in the fake stamps racket run by Abdul Karim Telgi with the connivance of police and politicians.

A team headed by retired Director General of Police S.S. Puri questioned the police chief at its office in Worli for more than six hours.

Since the team is expected to give a report to the court on Sharma's role in the scam on November 12, the police chief himself asked the SIT to talk to him.

More officers of the Mumbai Police's crime branch are to be probed for their involvement in the scam. Wagal was arrested on Friday under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) for shielding Telgi and giving special favours to him.

He was produced before a special court in Pune yesterday afternoon before Judicial magistrate A.A.A. Shaikh who remanded him in police custody till November 13.

The scam was initially unearthed in 2002 in Pune when Sharma was the police commissioner there. The joint commissioner of police in Pune, S.M. Mushrif, had alleged that the scam was not properly investigated.

The Telgi scandal has cut across several states and could run into billions of rupees that governments would have lost in terms of revenue due to a series of fake stamps printed out by Telgi. During the term of Wagal as joint commissioner of police, Crime Branch, in Mumbai between March 2002 and March 2003, he is said to have allegedly accepted money from Telgi to hush up the cases against him and for also according special favours to him.

Investigators became suspicious when Telgi, who was in the custody of Karnataka police, was brought to the city in November 2002 with regard to a murder case. Instead of bringing him to the crime branch office, he was put up in a hotel while in custody.

The SIT found that the police officers who accompanied him were acting at the behest of a senior officer. The embarrassed government transferred Wagal to the office of the DGP. Now, even Pradeep Sawant, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Crime Branch, has been shunted out of the crime branch department.

The special court in Pune is unraveling how Telgi used his money power to lure top politicians, policemen, printing press officers and others to get away with his racket. So far, 65 people, including 12 policemen, two MLAs and one lawyer, have been arrested for their involvement in the Telgi scam.

Some of the senior officers include Assistant Police Inspector Dileep Kamat, Crime Branch, Chembur, Senior Police Inspector Dattatray Dal and Additional Commissioner of Police Gokul Patil, State Intelligence.

Others behind bars are advocate Abdul Rashid Kulkarni, Telgi's legal counsel in Bangalore, MLAs Anil Ghote from Dhule, Maharashtra, C. Krishna Yadav from Himayatnagar, Hyderabad, officers of the Indian Security Press in Nashik, stamp vendors, Telgi's brothers and relatives.

TELGI TRAIL

The man behind the stamps scam
• Born in Telgi village in Bijapur district of Karnataka, Abdul Karim Telgi, 42, completed his B.Com from Belgaum and moved to Mumbai.

• He started a travel agency in the 1980s, then went abroad, returned to Mumbai, married and settled down to a job racket. When he was arrested for cheating, he met his mentor, Ram Ratan Soni, who was in jail for circulating fake share papers.

• In the following years, he was arrested for fraud, cheating, employment and export business racket.

• In 1999, he bought a scrap stamp printing machine from the Indian Security Press at Nashik which he repaired to mint stamps.

• The Karnataka police arrested him in the stamp paper case in November 2001. In April 2002, the Pune police recovered a huge consignment of fake stamp papers and then raids led police to over Rs 14 billion worth fake stamps.

• The Mumbai Police brought him to the city in connection with a murder case and soon seized fake stamps worth Rs eight billion from a depot in Bhiwandi.