It started with acquiring land in the Chaibasa area of Jharkhand in 2005. But soon after, former chief minister Madhu Koda and his circle of friends found Jharkhand too small a place to harbour their dreams. The focus shifted to expanding their empire in other metros and eventually going international. In places like Thailand, Liberia, Dubai and Singapore, from the limestone business to buying uranium mines — Koda and company tried its hand at a variety of businesses, official investigations show.
Binod Sinha and Sanjay Choudhary are considered key players in this ‘foreign direct investment’ initiative of the former CM. These two long-time associates of Koda are absconding.
They floated companies like the Balaji group for overseas operations. Documents in the income-tax office show one such company — Royal Tata Exports — writing a letter to a UAE-based company for limestone business. The company was registered in Dubai with Binod Kumar (Binod Sinha), Anil Kumar Singh and Malta Singh as its directors.
On May 31, 2007, Malta Singh wrote a letter to Al Shamai Gold factories of the UAE for a joint venture business in supplying limestone. “We have a vacant land measuring 48 rais near Ayutthaya river area (in Thailand). The cost of the land is Baht 600 thousand per rai (a unit of mesasuring land in Thailand). If you are interested, then you can use the land for the cement clinker plant.”
On June 2, 2007, an amount of $75,000 was transferred to Royal Tata Centre Exports through Rakbank for “Limestone purchase”, documents available with the Income Tax Department show.
Acting as an agent for Blue Techno projects (another company of the Koda gang), Royal Tata entered into a land purchase deal in Ayutthaya. Blue Techno transferred 500,000 Arab Emirate Dirhams on May 19, 2008, to Clean Energy Company. The request for transfer to the manager of the National Bank of Dubai was made by Sanjay Choudhury, documents show.
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In another letter, one Ashok Uppal writes to Sanjay Choudhary about purchasing the RIZKY coal mine in Indonesia. “If you find the offer viable, then we can take it forward by having a meeting with the mine owner next week in Jakarta,” the seized letter shows.
It was actually a diary, handed over to an I-T officer in Ranchi, which prompted an investigation into the Koda empire more than a year ago. The diary pages contain various ‘debit a/c’ in the names like Delhi Vinayak (Lalu), Prado, M P Singh London, Lucky project, Manoharji , DK a/c, among others.