CBI arrests railway engineer, private individual in Rs 15 lakh bribery case

The CBI arrested a South Central Railway senior section engineer and a private individual for allegedly exchanging a Rs 15 lakh bribe linked to a Rs 7 crore bonus claim. The agency said the engineer manipulated dates to favour a contractor

New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrested a senior section engineer from the South Central Railway and a private individual in connection with an alleged bribery case involving Rs 15 lakh, officials said Sunday.

The arrested individuals are Bapiraju, the Senior Section Engineer in the office of the Chief Signal and Telecommunications Engineer (CSTE) Projects for South Central Railway in Vijayawada, and Srichand, the son of the managing director of Yella Constructions Pvt Ltd.

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It is alleged that a joint venture between Ganapathi Engineering Works and Yella Constructions Pvt Ltd, which was awarded an Automatic Block Signalling project worth Rs 179.50 crore by South Central Railway, claimed a bonus of about Rs seven crore for completing the work ahead of schedule, officials said.

“It is alleged that officials of Chief Signal and Telecommunications Engineer (CSTE) Projects, S C Railway, Vijayawada manipulated and altered the dates pertaining to the bonus file to extend undue favour to the Joint Venture and facilitated approval of the bonus claim,” the CBI spokesperson said in a statement.

The CBI claimed that the managing director of the private company informed the accused engineer that his son would deliver the bribe amount while travelling from Visakhapatnam to Vijayawada on Sunday.
The CBI set up a trap and caught the engineer accepting the Rs 15 lakh bribe from the private individual, who was providing the payment as a reward for the sanction and release of the bonus amount to his father’s company, the agency said in its statement.

The bribe amount of Rs 15 lakh was recovered during the operation, the spokesperson added. “Searches are being conducted at the premises of the accused persons at Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Pithapuram and Hyderabad,” the statement said.