Nine people have been booked by the Visakhapatnam police for allegedly laundering Rs 570 crore by floating shell companies and making fraudulent remittances through hawala transactions. After a complaint by the joint director of income tax (investigations) M V N Seshu Bhavannarayana, the MVP Colony police in the town have filed cases against nine people.
Among the nine people are Vaddi Mahesh, a resident of Kolkata and native of Srikakulam. He is supposedly the key player. Other accused include, Achanta Harish, Chanta Rajesh, Prasanta Kumar Roy Barman, Praveen Kumar Jha, Ayush Goel, Vineet Goenka and Visas Guptha. They were booked along with the two others under IPC sections 420 (cheating), 120 b (criminal conspiracy), 465 (punishment for forgery), 468 (forgery) and 471 (using a forged document as genuine).
Reportedly, the police had taken 24-year old Vaddi Mahesh into custody. They were interrogating him now. The magnitude of his hawala dealings could be much bigger, suspect police.
The accused had created forged documents and established about 12 fake companies in Visakhapatnam and Kolkata as per the complaint. They also opened 30 bank accounts in the names of these companies at different places.
Probe by officials revealed that Vaddi Mahesh opened many proprietary concerns and partnership firms in the names of his workers, claiming huge turnovers. The bank account of the accused showed a total inward domestic transmittal of Rs 680.94 crore. Out of this, an amount of Rs 569.93 crore had been remitted fraudulently to five companies in China, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Probe revealed that this amount was send into a single account, from where it was disbursed to a variety of other accounts.
