The Income Tax department has seized Rs 106.52 crore in cash and gold bars weighing 127 kg during raids at eight locations in Chennai, the Finance Ministry said. Around Rs 10 crore of the seized money was in new Rs 2,000 notes, ANI reported. The premises raided by the investigators on Thursday reportedly belongs to a group involved in sand mining in the state, reported PTI.

The money reportedly belongs to S Reddy, a sand mining contractor working with the state government. He is being questioned by I-T officials, the news agency report said. The raids were conducted after the I-T department received intelligence inputs about Reddy’s activities in the last few days. I-T teams have also seized a number of documents during the raids.

As this report in The Indian Express says, “Reddy is well connected to many bigwigs and was involved in sand quarrying across the state in the last few years.” As this Scroll article had reported, he had replaced O Arumugasamy as the biggest sand miner after the latter fell out of Jayalalithaa’s good books.