Patna: The Enforcement Directorate on Thursday conducted multi-state searches in connection with a money laundering investigation into an alleged scam in the recruitment of police constables in Bihar during 2023, official sources said.

At least a dozen locations of private entities like agents, exam paper leak syndicate members and their associates in Patna and Nalanda in Bihar, Ranchi (Jharkhand), Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) and Kolkata (West Bengal) were raided under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), the sources said.

A press in Kolkata in which the exam papers were printed was also covered by the investigators of the federal probe agency, they said.

The masterminds of this alleged scam are the same as that of the NEET UG paper leak ‘scam’ of 2024, they said.

The Bihar Police Constable 2023 recruitment was aimed to fill 21,391 vacancies across various units of the Bihar police.

The examination was conducted at 529 centres across 37 districts of Bihar on October 1, 2023 attracting over 18 lakh aspirants.

Following allegations of the exam paper leak, it was cancelled by the state central selection board of constables (CSBC) on October 3 that year.

The money laundering case stems from some Bihar Police (economic offences unit or EOU) FIRs. The ED suspects money laundering in this case as a gang of agents generated “proceeds of crime” (illicit funds) by leaking the exam papers and selling it to aspirants and used the money given by the candidates to create personal assets.

Some Bihar police officials are also under the scanner of the ED, as per the sources.

The state police had arrested seven private people in this case, including three from West Bengal. An inter-state gang headed by Sanjeev Mukhiya was termed by the police as the perpetrators of this paper leak.

Mukhiya has worked as a technical assistant in a government college in Nalanda district. He is currently lodged in judicial custody.

The Bihar EOU found that an accused named Kaushik Kumar Kar had a Kolkata-based firm, Caltex Multiventure Pvt Ltd, and he was awarded the contract to print and supply the question papers for the constable recruitment examination.

However, it was discovered that Caltex Multiventure Pvt Ltd was a a one-room “shell” company with no employees, and printing and supply of question papers was outsourced to a company named Blessing Secured Press Pvt Ltd, where Kar’s wife was a director.