Hawala racket: Key accused arrested from Kolkata

The CBDT, based on the reports of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), conducted day-long raids at several premises of a Tamil fake-lottery businessman in Kolkata and Siliguri in North Bengal and seized over Rs. 80 crores cash, huge fake lottery tickets and currency-counting machines on Thursday.

CBDT teams raided one location in Siliguri and over ten locations in Kolkata and unearthed the racket involving laundering of money estimated to be over Rs. 1000 crore.

A senior IB officer told IBNS: "After interrogating X Alexander, who was detained earlier on Thursday, one of the main accused S Nagarjan has been detained from a flat at Hazra area on Kolkata last night. He is a resident of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu and lives in Kolkata with his family for years."

"Nagarjan is being interrogated and our search operation, to find other key accused including Santiago Martin who are absconding, is still underway," the source further revealed.

Nagarjan, Santiago Martin and another person allegedly ran a fake lottery business in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and North-Eastern states under the company’s name of General System and Future Plan Enterprise.

The IB officers are suspecting that a huge amount of cash has been transferred to Dubai through the international hawala channel.

However, taking assistance from the Income Tax (IT) Department, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) is likely to begin investigation into this case to know if there is any connection of Daud Ibrahim and his D-Company in this hawala racket, one ED source told IBNS.

(Reporting by Deepayan Sinha)