Corporate espionage: Middlemen stole documents for Rs 1,000

Even as the Finance Minister doled out sops for the corporates in the budget, the investigations into the corporate espionage case continues to go on in full swing. The recent arrest of two employees from the forest ministry and the UPSC has made investigators dig deeper.

An officer with the Delhi police probing the case tells OneIndia that no files have leaked out of the forest ministry. The two persons who have been arrested were only helping the accused build contacts in other ministries sneak files out.

Adding to their salaries

In the case of Jitendar Nagpal and Vipan Kumar it was found that they were earning Rs 1 lakh regularly after they decided to aid the accused in the corporate espionage case. Nagpal was a personal secretary to the joint secretary in the forest ministry while Kumar was a PA to a member of the UPSC.

Most of the departments of ministries are inter-connected and they knew persons in the other ministries as well. They used their contacts and even helped in sneaking documents out of the ministry. The most number of documents that have gone out are from the petroleum ministry, investigators say.

What is most ironic is that these persons have managed to continue with the scam unabated since the past 12 years, the police point out. They have not moved a single document out of their respective departments in all these years. They only built contacts in the other ministries and helped supply documents to the accused, the police say.

Using technology

The accused persons on several ocassions shared information with each other via mail. It has been found that they had created one email id and would save the information in the drafts. There was no communication over the wires and this was done to avoid detection.

They have been communicating using the save in drafts method since the past three years, the police have also found. They hardly spoke on the cell phones and most of the communication was always in person, the police have also learnt.

In the case of Kumar and Nagpal the police found that they were close to Lokesh Sharma an employee at a consultancy firm. Sharma had been arrested last week after it was found that he had been procuring the documents and selling it to other consultancy firms who in turn passed them on to the corporates.

What the middlemen earned

The Delhi police say that the middlemen managed to make a lot of money depending on the nature of the documents. The price list being presented below is the amount fixed for the middlemen. The rates of the documents by the time they were sold to the corporates shot up to almost Rs 2 crore per document depending on its nature.

Any document which was stolen from the office of the Prime Minister fetched Rs 2 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh. The notices that the ministry would issue was also sought after by the corporates. Notices would fetch Rs 1000 to Rs 2000. When middlemen would steal reports and surveys they would be paid Rs 50000.