Distilling Rs 353 crore is a big deal, indeed

Even by your standards, dear ET reader, Rs 353 crore in ice cream-cold cash is a sweet, big amount of dosh. This happens to be the amount I-T officials uncovered after six days of raids at multiple premises linked to Odisha MP Dhiraj Sahu. The Congress parliamentarian's association with the distillery company, Boudh, reportedly got the taxmen hunting. The cash, let it be noted, occupied 176 bags. This makes the stash the largest-ever collected by a single action by any probe in the country, making the likes of the Rs 21.9 crore in cash, Rs 56 lakh in foreign currency and Rs 76 lakh in gold found by the Enforcement Directorate last year linking the pile to Trinamool Congress leader Partha Chatterjee in neighbouring West Bengal seem like a sneeze.

The latest currency cache is believed to be 'unaccounted' money from cash sales of country liquor made by the distillery and its associates. Congress, understandably, has said it has nothing to do with Sahu's wheeling-dealings. When MPs or MLAs go rogue in the literal sense, they automatically become 'fringe' elements, whether it's pertaining to corruption, communalism or any other 'ism. But our eye is, quite like yours, on the money trail. Where does the Rs 353 crore now go? Into an SBI branch in Balangir, we're told. Why doesn't it become seed money for something profit-making? Like, say, a distillery?