Visakhapatnam hawala scam may be worth Rs 1,600 crore, suspects I-T dept

Visakhapatnam: The day after the Rs 570 crore hawala scam was unearthed by the Income Tax Department in Visakhapatnam, Income Tax officials now suspect that the dimensions of the scam are much bigger and that the nine accused persons have laundered Rs 1,600 crore by floating shell companies and making fraudulent remittances into them through hawala transactions.

The fraud was carried out between October 2013 and December 2016. The alleged kingpin of the scam is 24-year-old Vaddi Mahesh, a B.Com graduate, a native of West Godavari, who lived in Kolkata and shifted his base to Visakhapatnam in mid-2015. He created several fake companies for illegal foreign exchange dealings.

Highly placed sources in the Income Tax department said that top businessmen and others in Kolk-ata trusted and admired Mahesh for the finesse with which he handled the illegal trade, and his clientele grew in the past few years.

Recently, Mahesh bought a high-end Mercedes car which is what drew the attention of the tax department, and led to an investigation into his dealings, the sources added.

A senior officer in the I-T department said that between 2013 and 2015, Mahesh transferred Rs 1,000 crore in black money outside India using fake documents. In 2015, Mahesh shifted his base from Kolkata to Visakhapatnam. In 2015-16, he transferred another Rs 600 crore through hawala transactions.

Mahesh, whose father and others were all part of the illegal transfers of money, earned a commission of 85 paise per dollar transferred abroad. He invested the income from the commission in immovable assets which are now under investigation, and tax evasion proceedings will follow, the I-T officer added.

In this, the latest of ma-ny hawala scams in the country, Mahesh and his father Srinivasa Rao and his friends Achanta Harish and Achanta Rajesh opened 12 bogus companies in Vizag, Kolkata and other places, and posed as directors of these shell companies. They opened 30 bank accounts in the names of the fictitious companies.

The analysis of the bank accounts showed inward domestic remittances of Rs 680.94 crore. Of this, an amount of Rs 569.93 crore was remitted to five foreign companies in China, Singapore and Hong Kong for purchase of customi-sed software using forged documents. No software, however, was imported by the companies.

The hawala scam involved using several Permanent Account Numbers (PANs), opening multiple bank accounts and faking the turnover of the company.

DCP (Law and Order) Navin Gulati said the hawala racket was the first major one in the city, and many leads have to be followed up to nab the people who gave money to Mahesh for laundering. The converted ‘white’ money also has to be traced.