Lalitpur, May 28:

The Licence section of the Bagmati Zonal Transport Office (BZTO) of the Department of Transport Management (DoTM) has seized four fake bills submitted for the renewal of driving licences on Thursday.

“We suspect the involvement of a big racket in this case. We are launching an investigating to bust the racket,” said Arjun Panta, chief of the section, adding that the transport office will seek help from the Crime Investigation Branch of the Metropolitan Police for the same.

“We have reached up to one suspected middleman who submitted the fake bills,” he said, adding that the man refused to say where he got the bills. “This is the first time we came across fake bills in the office. More such bills might have been submitted to the office to evade revenue,” Panta said.

A section officer at the section Yadu Poudel said the employee whose signature was forged could not find out whether signatures on the bills were forged until he found that the bill numbers of the account section did not match with the bills submitted.

“This indicates that the people involved in this racket are professionals and are well-informed about the system of the office and its loopholes,” he said. An emergency meeting was called today after duty hours to decide on the future course of the investigation. Those fake bills were used to renew licences and evade thousands of rupees in revenue.

Poudel said the employees concerned have been asked to furnish written clarifications within 24 hours. The service-seekers concerned will also be contacted and quizzed before calling the police to investigate the case, he said.