The Babaleshwar Police have busted a massive financial fraud network running inside the Nandi Co-operative Sugar Factory at Krishna Nagar. Following a highly technical investigation, the district police arrested eight employees who allegedly manipulated automated weighing terminals to siphon away institutional capital. Announcing the breakthrough at a press conference, District Superintendent of Police Laxman Nimbargi confirmed that law enforcement teams have already successfully recovered or frozen an astounding ₹11.32 crore of the siphoned funds.
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The Weighment Manipulation Strategy and Fictitious Accounts
The systemic embezzlement scheme operated continuously across six consecutive sugarcane crushing seasons, spanning from 2020–21 to 2025–26. The criminal network was anchored by Dhareppa Dundappa Navi, a resident of Bidari village who was embedded directly within the factory’s core sugarcane weighing section. Working in absolute collusion with field officers and electronic token operators, the insider registry systematically manipulated incoming commercial shipments.
To execute the fraud, the suspects intercepted legitimate, sugarcane-laden tractors entering the factory parameters. The operators generated duplicate or completely bogus weighment tokens alongside lookalike billing receipts linked to real shipments, fraudulently over-recording the volume of crop transactions by approximately 34,490 metric tonnes. Relying on these fabricated procurement entries, the rogue staffers systematically diverted institutional payouts totaling ₹12,33,22,793 away from actual agrarian communities. The illicit funds were systematically routed into 91 distinct proxy bank accounts opened in the names of various associates and intermediaries, causing a massive corresponding financial drain to the co-operative mill’s asset base.
Audit Discoveries and Mass Asset Freezes
The industrial racket finally collapsed after the factory’s Managing Director, Ashok Sangappa Tippareddy, uncovered severe internal balance sheet mismatches and lodged a formal complaint with the Babaleshwar Police. Recognizing the scale of the institutional damage, Superintendent of Police Nimbargi constituted a specialized investigation team led by Vijayapura Rural Circle Inspector Ramesh Avaji, under the direct supervision of Additional SP Ramnagouda A Hatti and DSP TS Sulpi. Forensic audit squads launched an exhaustive physical and digital review of the weighing center’s historical logbooks and electronic transaction histories, which quickly exposed the fraudulent patterns and isolated Navi’s data signatures.
Following intense custodial interrogation of the primary weighment clerk, tactical teams executed a series of synchronized asset raids. Investigators recovered ₹21 lakh in hard cash directly from Navi’s possession and immediately seized ₹4.80 crore parked within his personal bank profiles. Moving swiftly to halt further layering of the siphoned funds, the special team intercepted another ₹5.48 crore that had been split across secondary accounts, while freezing an additional ₹82.07 lakh across various regional branches, securing a cumulative total of ₹11.32 crore within a remarkably short window.
Interstate Operations and Institutional Safeguards
Deep-dive tracking loops revealed that the arrested syndicate was comprised of seasoned white-collar operators with a history of targeting agricultural cooperatives. Alongside Navi, the police took seven other key field operatives into custody, identified as Bheerappa Basappa Gadadar, Yallappa Basappa Gadadar, Prakash Siddaling Gaddi, Parmanand Pundalik Gaddi, Mahadev Siddaling Kamble, Balappa Pandu Chopade, and Prabhakar. Background checks established that the group had previously deployed an identical lookalike weight-token manipulation blueprint to execute major frauds at cooperative sugar factories across the neighboring Belagavi and Bagalkote districts, where parallel criminal cases remain active against them.
The successful operation has drawn widespread praise from regional cooperative unions, and the factory management formally felicitated the specialized police personnel for their rapid containment of the multi-crore leak. State cooperative departments have issued an immediate directive to all heavy agro-industrial units in the region, mandating the immediate installation of multi-layered biometric verifications at all weighing bridges, independent third-party audits of seasonal token cycles, and direct integration of farmer bank accounts with decentralized state land registries. Zonal detectives are continuing their deep-dive financial audits to determine whether high-ranking administrative actors or banking executives provided secondary assistance to facilitate the multi-year diversion matrix.
