3 hours Ago By Express News Service
HYDERABAD: The Enforcement Directorate (ED), Hyderabad Zonal Office, has provisionally attached assets worth about Rs 5.34 crore belonging to private medical colleges under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 in connection with alleged blocking of seats for PG medical admissions. The ED initiated investigation on the basis of an FIR registered by the Matwada police station, Warangal, on the basis of the complaint of registrar, Kaloji Narayana Rao University of Health Sciences (KNRUHS) alleging that candidature of certain students with high NEET PG ranks were being used to block seats for PG medical admissions under the management quota.
In response to the warning of legal action given by KNRUHS to such suspected seat blockers, some candidates claimed they had not applied for registration under the management quota. The investigation by the agency revealed that some private medical colleges, in active collusion with consultants/ middlemen, were engaged in blocking seats using the certificates/ documents of high-ranking students. The blocked seats would be retained until the last phase of counselling and later the students were shown having exited and that they had paid the penalty imposed by the university for exiting.
Investigation revealed such a penalty was arranged by the private medical colleges themselves and was paid either directly through the college’s bank accounts or through middlemen. Such seats, shown as vacated, would be intimated by the colleges to the university and which would then be declared as stray vacancies. The stray vacancies were then released by the KNRUHS to the respective colleges to be filled on their own akin to institutional quota seats and the fees charged for such stray vacancies could be up to three times that of the regular fees for MQ1 management quota category.
The ED investigation revealed that the private medical colleges were charging additional fee up to three times and, in some cases, were also collecting capitation fee in the form of cash over and above the inflated fee.The excess fees and capitation fee so collected by the colleges over and above the regular MQ1 category fees against deliberately blocked seats were the proceeds of crime (POC) in this case. The assets attached by ED are in the form of bank balances in the bank accounts of Chalmeda Anand Rao Institute of Medical Sciences (Rs 3.
33 crore) and MNR Medical College (Rs 2.01 crore). In case of Malla Reddy Institute of Medical Sciences, ED had earlier seized unaccounted cash to the tune of Rs 1.
475 crore and had frozen bank balance of Rs 2.89 crore. The total value of seized / frozen / attached assets in this case stands at Rs 9.
71 crore..
