Income Tax department recovers Rs 73 crore cash, 100 kg of gold bars in Chennai

CHENNAI: The Income Tax department today recovered at least Rs 73 crore cash, including Rs 8 crore in new currency, and 100 kgs of gold bars in searches at multiple locations in the city here to check instances of tax evasion post demonetisation.

Officials said the department has called in for additional staff, auditors, counting machines and banking personnel to ascertain the final figures of the recovered assets and formalise the seizure process under tax laws.

They said the I-T teams launched operations on at least five locations of a "syndicate" involved in currency conversion and recovered Rs 8 crore in cash in new currency notes, Rs 65 core cash in old notes and 100 gold bars of 1kg each.

They said a number of documents related to financial transactions, entries of gold sale and records of sale/purchase are being scrutinised by the tax sleuths.

They added at least three people of the alleged syndicate are being questioned by the taxmen who are still in operations.

The tax department had made the largest seizure of Rs 5.7 crore cash in new notes in Bengaluru few days back after which two other central probe agencies, the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate, had taken over the cases to probe instances of corruption, money laundering and large-scale hawala transactions in the wake of the currency scrap on November 8.