Barely a fortnight ago, officials of the Income Tax department had done a stakeout of the house of filmstar Mahesh Babu’s sister and producer Manjula and her husband Sanjay Swaroop.
Not only did the sleuths not uncover anything significant on that occasion, yesterday’s raid on six film personalities, including the ‘Pokiri’ boy, too failed to unmask the latter’s ‘key associates’, to use IT department argot.
And what made it a comprehensive flop was an alleged tip-off barely hours before the raid.
For all the hype surrounding the swoop on the homes of Mahesh Babu, Charmee, directors S S Rajamouli and V V Vinayak, producer ‘Dil’ Raju, and G Chakradhar, popularly known as Chakri, all that the sleuths could find was a measly Rs 11 lakh.
The IT officials had a few more film personalities in their sights but for some reason dropped plans to raid them at the last hour.
Top sources in the IT department told us that the officials seized Rs 7 lakh from Chakri and Rs 4 lakh from ‘Dil’ Raju.
‘‘The market intelligence was not gathered prior to the raids and most importantly, the ‘key associates’ of these half a dozen personalities were not identified,’’ officials said.
While nothing was found in Mahesh Babu’s residence, Charmee’s father, who flew down from Maharashtra, assured the officials that he would soon produce all documents on behalf of his daughter.
But why do Income Tax sleuths mostly return with meagre amounts whenever they target the film industry? Between 2005 and 2006, IT raids were conducted in Chennai on several filmstars, including Trisha and Asin, and in these instances too paltry amounts were found.
Earlier, in 2001 in Mumbai, raids were conducted on the premises of Aishwarya Rai and Rani Mukherjee and the result was the same
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