Karnataka Public Service Commission job racket: ED arrests suspended KPSC chairman Shivashankarappa Sahukar, another officer

(Inset) Shivashankarappa Sahukar was suspended on August 25; the KPSC office in Bengaluru. (Source: kpsc.kar.nic.in)

The Enforcement Directorate on Tuesday arrested suspended chairman of Karnataka Public Service Commission (KPSC) Shivashankarappa S Sahukar and a member of the Commission, B V Geetha, in connection with its money laundering probe into the recruitment of veterinary officers through KPSC.

The arrests came in the wake of a fresh round of searches on Tuesday at a flat where Sahukar lived in Bengaluru, and statements given to the ED in recent weeks by arrested IAS officer Gyanendra Kumar Gangwar and a middleman, Basavaraj Kannale, about corruption at the KPSC.

A Bengaluru Zone official of the ED confirmed the arrest of Sahukar and Geetha on Tuesday. “Their custody will be sought after production before a special judge,” the official said

The Karnataka High Court and a special court for CID cases had earlier rejected anticipatory bail pleas of the suspended KPSC chairman while pointing out that he was the custodian of the KPSC and hence responsible for all illegal activities that occurred under his watch.

Sahukar was suspended by Karnataka Governor Thaawar Chand Gehlot on August 25 over “illegal” recruitment of his daughter to a state government job through KPSC. He was being investigated by the Karnataka Police in connection with multiple complaints of fraud in KPSC recruitment, but had not been arrested by the state police so far.

Sahukar has been accused in two specific cases of fraud: the KPSC recruitment of veterinary officers for 400 vacancies in the state and the recruitment of his daughter as an industrial officer on the basis of a fake income certificate.

Sahukar and KPSC were at the centre of a series of investigative reports by The Indian Express on the recruitment scam during the tenure of Sahukar, who was picked by the BJP for the KPSC chairman post in 2019 and retained by the Congress, which came to power in Karnataka in 2023.

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The ED’s arrest of Sahukar and B V Geetha comes following statements by Gangwar on KPSC officials using preliminary selection lists to extort aspirants during multiple job recruitments done by the Commission in the last two years.

Arrested middleman Basavaraj Kannale also claimed to have given crores of Rupees to KPSC officials after collecting bribes from candidates for various job recruitments, said sources.

According to the sources, Gangwar told the ED during questioning that when the 1:3 merit list for the veterinary doctors recruitment was published on February 4, 2026, KPSC officials, including Sahukar, Geetha, Shanta Hosmani, Elfreda D Silva, among others, approached him with candidate names to seek information about their prospects, and he divulged the information.

“Once the merit of a candidate was known, the concerned member, official or middleman contacted the candidate and negotiated the bribe amount; the higher the candidate’s chance of selection, the higher the amount demanded,” the ED informed a special court last week.