Unaccounted money a major challenge for investigators probing scams: A P Singh, CBI Director

NEW DELHI: With allocation of natural resources emerging as a fertile ground for corruption, unaccounted money is playing a crucial role in the plundering of these resources, posing a major challenge to policy makers and investigators, CBI Director A P Singh said today.

The agency is probing number of corruption cases in the exploitation of natural resources like iron ore, coal, off-shore minerals, spectrum among others.

The Director who was summing up two-day annual conference of the CBI and state anti-corruption bureaux cautioned that allocation precious natural resources are attracting attention for being fertile ground of corruption.

"The conference deliberated upong the issue of allocation of precious natural resources and policy challenges. The allocation of iron, coal spectrum, land and other such resources have also attracted lot of attention as being a fertile ground for corruption practices. The issue has taken centre stage in the debate on corruption," he said.

He said conference also looked at the legal issues in involved in the allocation of natural resouces.

"One crucial aspect which emerged is the role of unaccounted money (mostly in cash transactions) in plundering of natural resources as it seems to be the cause as well as effect of organised acts of corruption. This is surely a challenge before all of us both at policy formulation and implementation level to find right approach and tools to deal with it," he said.

Earlier speaking at the conference, Minister of state for personnel V Narayanasamy said elected government has every right to formulate policy of allocation of natural resouces and bonafide decisions need to be protected.

He said that if some wrong is found at the level of implementation of a policy the erring person should be punished and not the entire system.