Hyderabad, July 15: The Andhra government is on a desperate hunt to ferret out the Rs 11 crore it paid to a dubious hole-in-the-wall outfit faking a Volkswagen identity. The Union finance and home ministries are helping the scam-jolted state government trace the money, believed to have been salted away in an obscure Swiss account.

Volkswagen itself has not made any reference to where the cash could lie. In recent emails to the Andhra government, all it said was that the payment made to Vashisht Wahan was being investigated by German authorities.

State industry commissioner Sudip Bhattacharya received a message on June 11 in which the German company said the probe would centre on the “suspicion of fraud and breach of trust in our common India project”.

Bhattacharya, in the US now, will reach Germany by July 21 and join state officials leaving Hyderabad over the weekend. In all probability, they will sit across the table with Jagdish Raja, the Vashisht office-bearer who is already there and has promised to co-operate in the probe. B. Satyanarayana, the Andhra industry minister who has now been assigned a new department, is accused of having ordered the state industrial corporation to release funds “within six hours” without running a check on the antecedents of Vashisht.

Amid the scramble to unearth the money paid to Helmuth Schuster, the sacked VW official who allegedly siphoned off the Andhra cash, it is being increasingly clear that the Union finance ministry had raised questions about the VW deal. Their posers were sent to Andhra chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy and Satyanarayana while they were on a four-nation swing early this month.

“Is this the way you deal with an international company. Even a visiting card from its top brass is treated as a holy bible?” fumed a finance ministry official, aghast at discovering that Andhra authorities had parted with the money merely on an email from Schuster.

After he touched down on July 12, Reddy sent frantic appeals to Union home minister Shivraj Patil to help crack what by then had turned into an “international fraud”.

Meanwhile, German radio and TV ARD said Schuster was in India late last month ? after his exit from VW ? and was trying to organise cash from his Angolan partners so that it could be funnelled back into Vashisht.