ED attaches JC assets

PNS|Vijayawada

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday attached JC Prabhakar Reddy and his associate Gopal Reddy’s assets worth Rs 22.10 Cr in an ongoing investigation under PMLA. More than a month-and-a-half after grilling former MLA and Tadipatri municipal chairman JC Prabhakar Reddy in the transport scam, the Enforcement Directorate authorities on Wednesday attached some of the assets belonging to his firms. According to ED sources in Delhi, the agency attached properties worth Rs 22 crore belonging to Prabhakar Reddy and Gopal Reddy, who happened to be alleged benamis of Prabhakar Reddy in the transport scam.

The ED took the action following the revelations that Prabhakar Reddy’s company produced fake invoices of BS-III vehicles and converted them into BS-IV to get them registered in other states including Nagaland, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in order to avoid payment of additional taxes.

The ED found that the vehicles were brought as scrap from Ashok Leyland company. The investigation is still going on. On October 6, the Enforcement Directorate grilled Prabhakar Reddy for over nine hours in connection with the alleged transport scam.

Prabhakar Reddy was charged with obtaining of fake No-Objection Certificate and fake insurance papers for 154 private buses belonging to their family concern JC Travels. The Road Transport Authority (RTA) authorities seized these vehicles. The JC brothers were charged with getting registered the buses of BS-III category illegally by showing them as BS-IV and were run for the last three years, before they were seized.

Of these 154 buses, as many as 50 buses were registered in the name of Jatadhara Industries and 104 buses in the name of C Gopal Reddy. As many as 33 buses were registered in Karnataka, 15 in Telangana and 101 in Andhra Pradesh. The police registered 27 FIRs in Anantapur and three in Kurnool against the JC brothers. Later, the RTA authorities wrote to the Centre to blacklist the company and order a probe. The latest raid is believed to be part of the investigation, sources said.