Kolkata: The Enforcement Directorate arrested Kolkata-based businessman Parasmal Lodha from Mumbai airport late on Wednesday while he was allegedly trying to flee the country.
Rs 2.6 lakh in new currency notes were recovered from him at the time of his arrest.
Lodha, on whom a lookout notice was slapped, is suspected to have converted Rs 25 crore of old currency notes into new ones post demonetization in the Sekhar Reddy and Rohit Tandon cases.
Reddy, a sand mining baron, and two of his associates were arrested from Chennai by the CBI on Wednesday in connection with the Income Tax department's detection of 142 core rupees of unaccounted income. Another Rs 13.5 crore were seized from Tandon's law firm in Delhi on the same day.
The IT department had reportedly seized Rs 170 crore in cash and some 130 kg of gold in bullion and jewellery during the raids it conducted at on Reddy in Chennai alone.
Lodha is believed to have maintained a low profile in Kolkata’s social circles despite owning a mansion in south Kolkata’s posh Queens Park area. Besides being a real estate developer, Lodha has stakes in mining, finance and consultancy firms.
Lodha came into the limelight in the early 90s for his aggressive takeover of the Peerless General Finance and Investment Company Limited, then India’s largest non-banking financial institution. It was alleged that Lodha forced Peerless Chairman and Managing Director PC Sen to sell majority stake in the company to him. In 2010, Lodha’s name again cropped up in the Stephen Court fire case on Kolkata’s Park Street in which 43 people died. He was alleged to have built the top three illegal floors of the building to the existing five, something that he has been accused of doing to many existing properties of the city. Although Lodha denied the charges, he was absconding during the investigations of the case.
Lodha is alleged to have been laundering money for the high and mighty across the country, including politicians. The recent high profile wedding of his daughter was attended by several inhabitants of the state and country's power corridors.
Lodha has been brought to Delhi for interrogations and would be produced before a court on Thursday where investigators would plea for further custody under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
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