Officials said those assets were transferred to the Mirchi family by a company owned by the Wadhawan brothers.
New Delhi:
The Department of Law Enforcement (DE) said on Tuesday it had tied up Dubai-based assets worth more than Rs 203 crore from the family of gangster Iqbal Mirchi in a case money laundering.
The attached assets include 15 commercial and residential properties owned by Mirchi’s “family members”. They include a hotel called the Midwest Hotel Apartment, the ED said.
They are valued at Rs 203.27 crore and have been provisionally tied under the Money Laundering Prevention Act (PMLA), the central investigative agency said in a statement.
Officials said those assets were transferred to the Mirchi family by a Dubai-based company owned by brothers Wadhawan, Kapil Wadhawan, and Dheeraj Wadhawan.
The Wadhawan are the promoters of Dewan Housing Finance Limited (DHFL). They were arrested by the ED in another money laundering case linked to allegedly bad loans from Yes Bank.
Kapil Wadhawan was also arrested by the agency in connection with the Mirchi PMLA case, but was subsequently granted bail.
With this action, the total attachment in this case by the ED amounts to Rs 776 crore. Two similar seizure orders were issued by the ED in December of last year.
Mirchi, who died in 2013 in London, is said to have been the right-hand man of global terrorist Dawood Ibrahim in crimes of drug trafficking and extortion.
“He (Mirchi) was an international drug trafficker and smuggler who had amassed enormous wealth and acquired various real estate and businesses across the world,” the DE had said earlier.
The agency alleged that Mirchi “indirectly owned various properties in and around Mumbai”.
He has filed a criminal complaint against Mirchi, her family and others to investigate the money laundering charges for alleged illegal transactions in buying and selling expensive real estate assets in Mumbai.
This PMLA case is based on several FIRs filed by the Mumbai police.
The agency had filed an indictment in the case in a Mumbai court in December and the court subsequently issued unlimited, non-binding warrants against Mirchi’s sons, Asif Memon and Junaid Memon, and his wife Hajra Memon. .
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
