Visakhapatnam hawala case: 3 teams formed to nab accused
The passports of the accused have been impounded to prevent them from leaving the country.
Visakhapatnam: The city police has formed three teams to nab the nine persons involved in the hawala case, including the kingpin Vaddi Mahesh, two Kolkata based chartered accountants and three persons who provided the money for the hawala transactions.
The police suspects the involvement of politicians and businessmen in Kolkata, Odisha and North Andhra in the hawala scam, but are yet to find evidence of this.
The police suspects that the hawala operators accused in what is turning out to be one of the country’s biggest financial scams, have made use of the demonetised currency notes (of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 denominations) in amassing large amounts of money and later transferred the money to banks in China, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Sources in the police department said that during the initial days of demonetisation, bank and tax officials facilitated people to convert huge amounts of money into the new currency.
DCP (Law and Order, North Zone) Navin Gulati said that in this hawala case, over Rs 570 crore in ‘black’ or unaccounted money, went out from India and came back multiplied, and was again sent out to foreign banks. Much of this business was carried out in Kolkata where India’s top hawala kings operate their businesses.
The 24-year-old Mahesh resides in Kolkata, thou-gh he is a native of West Godavari district and li-ved for some time in Sri-kakulam where his father Srinivasa Rao has a stone-crushing business. His father and his friends Achanta Harish and Chanta Rajesh, are also natives of West Godavari. Together with the other accused in the case — Prasanta Kumar Roy Bar-man, Praveen Kumar Jha (both chartered accountants from Kolkata), Ayush Goel, Vineet Goenka and Vikar Gupta — they laundered '570 crore by floating shell companies and making fraudulent remittances into them th-rough hawala transactions.
Prasana Kumar Bur-man and Praveen Kumar Jha helped Mahesh to create false companies and remit the money in the foreign banks. Ayush Goel, Vineet Goenka and Vikar Gupta are suspected to be the businessmen who provided the money for the hawala transactions.
DCP Gulati said that based on the complaint from income tax officials, who unearthed the scam, "we have registered cases against nine persons under IPC sections 420 (cheating), 120 b (criminal conspiracy), 465 (punishment for forgery), 468 (forgery) and 471 (using a forged document as genuine). The accused also violated the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act."
The DCP hinted that the case may be handed over to the Crime Investigation Department (CID) or the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) since it has wider dimensions and may require the Money Laundering Act and the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act to be invoked for further investigation.
Sources in the police said that some of the accused in the case have gone underground and a search is on to nab them. The passports of the accused have been impounded to prevent them from leaving the country.