Anantapur: In a major breakthrough, Anantapur police busted fake pattadar passbook racket and arrested 12 persons on Sunday including the VRO and seized 17,100 fake pattadar passbooks worth of Rs 1.13 crore along with computers, laptop, printers, a car, stamps of tahsildars, RDOs and the collector.
 
The gang was printing fake books at a house in Anantapur and selling it to various parts of the district. Fake passbooks were being used to get loans from banks along with subsidies from many banks. It is suspected many prominent people including bankers, political leaders and revenue officials involved in the scam.
 
Deputy Chief Minister K.E. Krishna Murthy has ordered a detailed probe into the issue. Anantapur SP S.V. Rajasekhar Babu said Medasari Sreenivasulu of Cherlopalli in Bathalapalli mandal has a criminal record in two murder cases. He hatched a plan to earn easy money through fake pattadar passbooks business and approached Bathalapalli mandal Parishad vice-president K. Venkateswar Reddy and local leaders K. Raghunath Reddy and Madhusudan Reddy. They formed a gang with Kakarla Anandkumar and his sons Prasanth Chowdary in Anantapur and started printing pass books.
 
MPP vice-president's  relative Nagasekhar Reddy was acting as mediator and supplying fake passbooks to Sreenivasulu and others at Rs 1500 each. Sreenivasulu gang was assisted by VRO M. Jaganmohan Reddy, retired VRO K. Adinarayana and other revenue employees and bankers to feed forged documents into the passbooks.
 
Following a tip off, Dharmavaram police in-spector S. Murali Krishna and SI B. Hemanth Kumar seized a car dumped with pattadar passbooks and after grilling the persons, they revealed the activities. The gang was selling each one from Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 in the market to get subsidised loans on government schemes.