IAS officer Arvind Kumar again appears before ACB in Formula E case

Hyderabad, July 3 (IANS) Telangana's senior IAS officer and Special Chief Secretary Arvind Kumar appeared again before the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) on Thursday in the Formula E race case.

The agency officials, probing allegations of unauthorised misuse of government funds, were questioning him at the ACB office here.

Arvind Kumar was recently served notice, but he could not appear as he was on a foreign tour. He was served fresh notice after his return early this week.

This is the second time Arvind Kumar has been questioned by the ACB in this case. He had earlier appeared before the anti-graft agency in January.

The IAS official has been summoned nearly three weeks after Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) and former minister K. T. Rama Rao was questioned by the ACB for the second time.

The ACB on June 16 questioned K. T. Rama Rao (KTR) for nearly eight hours.

The former minister had appeared before the ACB on January 9 in the case relating to the conduct of the Formula E race in Hyderabad in January 2023, when the BRS was in power.

The ACB in December last year booked a case against KTR, former Special Chief Secretary, Municipal Administration and Urban Development (MA&UD), Arvind Kumar and the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority's (HMDA) former Chief Engineer B.L.N. Reddy for alleged Rs 54.88 crore irregularities in the Formula-E deal.

The FIR was registered on a complaint by Principal Secretary, MA&UD, M. Dana Kishore, who stated that foreign remittances were made without prior approvals of the relevant regulatory authorities, which resulted in additional tax burden to HMDA to the tune of Rs . 8.06 crore.

The complainant also alleged that the payment was made while the Model Code of Conduct was in effect for the elections to the Legislative Assembly without any prior approval of the Election Commission of India.

The FIR was registered under the Prevention of Corruption Act as well as under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 409 (criminal breach of trust) and 120B (criminal conspiracy).