TTD Dy EO Lokanadham arrested after ACB finishes four-premises DA raids

The Anti-Corruption Bureau’s week at Tirumala ended in an arrest, not only a search. Mendu Lokanadham, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams Deputy Executive Officer in charge of the Srivari temple at Tirumala, was arrested early on Thursday, 3 September 2026, after the Bureau completed simultaneous raids at four premises in a disproportionate-assets case.

He was produced before the ACB Court in Nellore and placed under judicial remand. The public record of the seizures lists movable and immovable assets valued at about ₹5 crore. Among the items locked to the filings: about 2 kg of gold, about 6.5 kg of silver, and ₹12.5 lakh in cash. Those figures are the inventory the Bureau put on the record after the searches; this cutting does not invent deposit face values, plot valuations, or FIR section numbers that were not locked.

The timeline is short and continuous. Raids began on Wednesday. They concluded early on Thursday. The arrest followed the completion of those four simultaneous premises searches. For devotees who treat the Srivari temple administration as a trust office as much as a religious one, the sequence matters: the Dy EO who held charge of the hill shrine was taken into custody after the Bureau said the asset searches were finished, not while they were still open-ended.

A political counter-narrative arrived the same day. Former TTD trust board chairman Bhumana Karunakar Reddy of the YSR Congress Party alleged inconsistencies in how the case was described. On his telling, an ACB DSP had spoken of complaints, while Wednesday’s ACB release linked the action to the laddu ghee adulteration case. He questioned the information path from the Central Bureau of Investigation to the ACB, and he pointed to a prior disproportionate-assets case against K. Chinna Appanna, who had served as personal assistant to then chairman Y.V. Subba Reddy. Those points are recorded here as allegations by a named political figure, not as findings of this desk.

What the locked record does not yet show is as important as what it does. No concluded charge sheet is published in the facts used here. No statement by Lokanadham is locked. No judicial finding on the asset valuations is locked. The established public facts remain: four premises, an early-Thursday arrest, Nellore ACB Court production, judicial remand, and a seizure list that the Bureau valued at about ₹5 crore including gold, silver and cash.

Tirumala’s temple administration sits at the centre of Andhra Pradesh’s religious economy and of every government’s political scrutiny. An ACB arrest of the Dy EO in charge of the Srivari temple therefore lands as both a corruption story and a governance story. Readers should hold the seizure inventory and the remand order as established, and hold the former chairman’s CBI-to-ACB and laddu-ghee linkage claims as contested political speech until a court or a finished charge sheet says otherwise.

This cutting replaces any earlier raid-only frame. The new fact of 3 September is the arrest and the remand, not merely the search.