New Delhi: The Uttar Pradesh Police’s special task force (STF) on Wednesday, April 26, arrested Sanjay Rai ‘Sherpuria’, a businessman, from Lucknow in connection with allegations that he and his aides collected money from several people and organisations by claiming links to Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Indian Express reported.
Police said Rai and his aides forged documents with a false reference to the PMO.
Rai ended up in the police’s net after police received information that he had taken Rs 6 crore from Gaurav Dalmiya, a Delhi-based businessman, promising to get his name cleared from a probe being carried out against him by a central investigation agency, according to Dainik Bhaskar.
The STF arrested him at Kanpur railway station while he was traveling from Delhi to Ghazipur. He was handed over to Vibhuti Khand police station. Two days prior, Rai’s aide, Kashif, was arrested in Noida after police conducted searches at multiple locations in Noida.
A senior STF official told Indian Express that central agencies, including the Intelligence Bureau and the Enforcement Directorate (ED), are supervising the investigation and the action being taken in this “high profile case”. He added that STF is not investigating the particular case.
Rai runs an organisation called “For Youth,” an NGO, with the slogan to make Ghazipur self-sufficient through self-employment. There are allegations that he has routed his alleged ill-gotten money through his NGO.
The Dainik Bhaskar report shows photographs of Rai with several of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leaders, including J.P. Nadda, Anurag Thakur, Keshav Prasad Maurya and Mohan Bhagwat. The Wire cannot immediately confirm the veracity of these pictures.
Rai is said to have been a BJP ticket aspirant from the Ghazipur assembly constituency in 2017. However, he failed to secure a ticket. He is also said to have been involved in the 2019 BJP parliamentary election campaign from Varanasi, represented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He also authored a book on Modi, Divya Drishti Modi.