ESI director and 6 others held in Insurance fake bill scam

By Newsmeter Network  Published on  27 Sep 2019 8:12 AM GMT
ESI director and 6 others held in Insurance fake bill scam

Hyderabad: Telangana Anti Corruption Bureau, after conducting searches at more than 20 locations for 24 hours, finally arrested Insurance Medical Services-IMS Director, Devika Rani who masterminded the whole scam. Six more persons, including two private persons who partnered with her in the scam, were also arrested. The searches by the ACB that began on Thursday morning, concluded with the arrests in the early hours of Friday. The arrested persons were shifted to ACB headquarters at Banjara hills for further interrogation.

Other arrested persons include Padma, Joint director, Vasantha Indira, Assistant director, Radhika Pharmacist, Nagaraju, an employee of Omni medicals pharma company, Harshavardan, Senior assistant at IMS and Srihari, MD of Omni pharma.

The scam broke recently after a vigilance inquiry into purchases made by IMS for ESI hospitals in the state, found medicines which were not needed, purchased to favour a few firms and medicines regularly used were purchased at relatively high prices. Inquiries revealed that all such firms that supplied medicines to ESI in this manner were owned by close family members of Devika Rani and her benami persons.

The State Government then ordered the ACB to investigate the inquiry findings. ACB registered a case and started an inquiry. After two months of inquiry, ACB sleuths went into action.

Though the vigilance report suggested Devika Rani and other accused had siphoned around Rs 300 Crores, initial inquiries made by ACB found the loss was around Rs 10 Crores. In the future, the amount may become higher as there is a lot to be investigated into, said officials.

The arrested persons will be produced before the court on Friday.

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