Mumbai: Customs officer caught red handed taking bribe in 2019, gets 3 years rigorous imprisonment

Mumbai: A special court on Wednesday sentenced an appraising officer of the customs department under the Prevention of Corruption Act (PCA) to three years of rigorous imprisonment after he was caught red-handed accepting a bribe of ₹10,000 of the ₹20,000 he had demanded from a businessman, following a complaint.

Special CBI Judge AS Sayyad also imposed a fine of ₹5,000 on Subhash Jha. Jha was on bail pending trial. Public Prosecutor CBI Sandeep Singh said the Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) of the CBI had registered a complaint against him after the proprietor Prakash Manchudiya of Pooja Vision, a dealer of lenses and camcorders in Fort, approached the branch with a written complaint in Aug 2019. The officer was then working in the air Cargo Complex of the airport. 

Officer had demanded bribe for providing NOC

As per the complaint, the customs department had put his importer-exporter code on “alert”, due to which he was unable to export consignments. The demand was made when he approached Jha regarding the issue. The officer demanded ₹5,000 for an no-objection certificate that would be valid for 15 days within which he could carry out the job. Jha then issued the NOC and again demanded ₹20,000 for a permanent revocation of the alert. He had then agreed on ₹10,000 after negotiation.

ACB laid trap and caught Jha while accepting bribe

After verifying the complaint by recording a conversation of the officer with the businessman, the ACB had laid a trap in which the complainant had handed over ₹10,000 of the amount to him and Jha had accepted it. A recording device was attached to the complainant to capture the conversation, if any, between them during the handover of the cash. An independent witness who was sent by the CBI team along with the businessman for the trap procedure, said that the officer had said “Maal do” when they went to meet him to give the bribe amount.