The Chhattisgarh government on Thursday (July 10, 2025) suspended 22 senior Excise department officials, three days after they were chargesheeted by investigators in the alleged liquor scam.The Economic Offences Wing was investigating the case in which former State Excise Minister and Congress MLA Kawasi Lakhma and others were named as accused. In the chargesheet, it had named 29 Excise officials, of whom seven have retired. In the latest supplementary chargesheet, the agency has also revised upwards the estimate of the loss caused to the exchequer due to the alleged scam, pegging it at ₹3,200 crore from ₹2,161 crore earlier.Those facing administrative action included three Assistant District Excise Officers, five Deputy Commissioners, ten Assistant Commissioners, three District Excise Officers and an Assistant Excise Officer.As per the Directorate of Enforcement (ED), which was investigating the money laundering angle in the said case, a syndicate of senior State bureaucrats, politicians, and Excise department officials were accused of running a “parallel” excise department, wherein liquor was sold to the public, but no money came to the State exchequer.“...as per the instructions of the Excise Syndicate, additional liquor was produced in distilleries, loaded in trucks and sent directly to the country liquor shops with high sales in the selected districts. Such liquor was sold parallel to the legal liquor brought to the shops on the basis of demand from the warehouse/government depot from the distillery, without paying any kind of government fee/duty,” the press statement from EOW added. Published - July 10, 2025 10:16 pm IST