Congress served I-T show-cause notice over `170 crore funding

New Delhi: The Income Tax Department on Monday served a show-cause notice to the Indian National Congress after the party failed to submit documents related to an inflow of Rs 170 crore of alleged black money into its accounts from a Hyderabad-based infrastructure company.

The I-T department also claimed that senior Congress officials did not turn up when summoned on November 4 in connection with the matter.

Sources familiar with developments said the cash was allegedly transferred to the Congress party through hawala channels. The I-T department claimed to have detected the flow of funds to the party after it had recently conducted raids at the company's premises, which had allegedly revealed a bogus contracting racket worth thousands of crores, according to officials.

The I-T raids on the company, conducted in the first week of November at 42 places across the country, had shown that the infrastructure firm was allegedly running a large racket of cash generation through bogus contracts and transactions, officials had then said. The department had claimed at the time that the company was siphoning off funds meant for government projects. The company is known to have won major infrastructure contracts from multiple state governments.

After the raids, the Income Tax officials had claimed that the company was allegedly involved in siphoning-off funds through bogus contracts worth over Rs 3,300 crore. The raids had also unearthed unexplained cash of over Rs 4 crore and jewellery worth more than Rs 3.2 crore, officials added. The I-T officials had also claimed that they had found evidence of a large network of hawala operators working with the big corporate and of the entire chain of delivery used by the nexus.