A special court has taken cognisance of the chargesheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against three accused persons in the alleged “scholarship scam” estimated to be of ₹100 crore in Uttar Pradesh. They were arrested by the agency in April.
The accused have been identified as Izhar Hussain Jafri, Ali Abbas Jafri and Ravi Prakash Gupta and they are in judicial custody.
Earlier, the agency had conducted searches on various educational institutes across several districts of Uttar Pradesh and seized evidence allegedly confirming prima facie that there was a scam. The information was passed on to the State police under Section 66 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act for registering a first information report (FIR) against the suspects.
The ED probe revealed that the accused persons were running the scam under the Hygia group of colleges and had fraudulently obtained scholarship funds amounting to about ₹100 crore using Aadhaar and bank details of ineligible persons who were shown as students. The agency found that 3,000 such accounts in the names of students, using the documents of various persons and common email IDs, were opened.
According to the ED, the three accused in conspiracy with the agents of Financial Inclusion Network and Operations (FINO) payment bank, including Mohammed Sahil Aziz, Amit Kumar Maurya, Tanveer Ahmad and Jitendra Singh, diverted the scholarship funds from students’ accounts to those of the Hygia group of colleges, other persons and institutes.
The chargesheeted persons controlled the bank accounts of beneficiary students and illegally kept their ATM cards, phone numbers and other details and withdraw the funds in cash from the bank accounts of students at various locations. “The scholarship funds were also transferred to various accounts of accused persons, their relatives and Oregon Educational Society,” it said.
The ED had earlier attached bank balances and immovable assets amounting to ₹3.2 crore in the case.
