“The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday carried out searches at several locations in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai in connection with a case against Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO) and its MD U.S. Awasthi”, reports news agency IANS.
One of the Directors of IFFCO, on condition of anonymity admitted that indeed an ED team had come on Thursday and since our dealings are always transparent we gave them all the papers they wanted”.
Sounding confident of coming away from it unscathed as always, the Director said “IFFCO has earned its brand name due to its above-board financial conduct; there are complaints against it no doubt but so is the case with other corporate entities as well. We have nothing to hide”, he added.
The Director also explained that there were no raids conducted in the Chennai or Mumbai offices of IFFCO as is being reported in some sections of the media. ED officers came to Delhi and we cooperated with them, he added.
Indian Cooperative has learnt that it was perhaps the IPL office in Chennai or the office of international supplier Jyoti Enterprise in Mumbai which were searched and the media inadvertently called them as searches in the IFFCO offices.
The current searches have its genesis in the past. It was during the tenure of late Anant Kumar when the Union Chemical and Fertiliser Ministry made a strong bid to takeover IFFCO by refusing to accept govt shares returned by IFFCO to the govt in the past. The court of Central Registrar had upheld IFFCO’s stand in the matter.
Later in August 2018, the then Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilisers, Rao Indrejit Singh, said in Lok Sabha that the government has received various complaints against IFFCO and has referred various complaints to CBI for enquiry.
Several co-operators associated with IFFCO feel that frivolous complaints are brought to the notice of the government or gossiped about whenever a co-op entity becomes successful.