Today the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav’s daughter Misa Bharti’s Chartered Accountant Mr. Rajesh Agarwal, in connection with the money laundering case of around Rs 8000 crore rupees. Mr. Agarwal provided money to Misa Bharti’s company and it will be produced before the Patiala court.
Last week the Income Tax department of India conducted a raid at various locations in the national capital, Delhi, and Gurugram on various companies and all the people associated with Lalu Prasad Yadav. The income tax department had raided nearly 20 locations looking for evidence about Lalu Prasad and his family’s proxy land deals to the tune of more than one thousand crore rupees.
The ED had recently filed charges against two entry operators Mr. Surendra Kumar Jain and Virendra Jain. They have been accused of creating companies that do not really carry any real business activity but exist officially on paper to whitewash black money. And those Jain brothers were arrested in March 2017. Rajesh Agarwal’s arrest is the closest that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has come to the Lalu Prasad Yadav household. Mr. Agarwal will be questioned in detail about all such deals and people linked to this activity once the agency gets his custody. The Jain brothers were also attached with a case of agricultural land worth Rs 1.12 crore belonging to them in Bhatti village in the National Capital area.
The ED believes that Misa Bharti was one of the many high-profile people who used CA Rajesh Agarwal to launder black money. A govt. official said, “obviously he will be questioned about all deals that he has facilitated during his questioning”. Bihar’s senior BJP leader, Sushil Kumar Modi, who has been accusing the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief and his family of corrupt deals told that there was a link between those Jain brothers, Mr. Rajesh Agarwal and Lalu prasad’s daughter Misha Bharti.
Sushil Kumar Modi accused Misa Bharti of laundering money through a shell company to buy a farmhouse at National Capital area at a throwaway price in 2008-2009 when her father was a union minister. According to Sushil Kumar, Lalu’s daughter sold her company’s shares of face value of Rs. 10 each to Virendra Jain’s Shalini Holdings at Rs. 100 per share in 2008, which fetched her Rs. 1.20 crore. And after eleven months, Misha Bharti purchased all the shares at the rate of Rs. 10/ share from Jain brothers. Later, she also bought a farmhouse in Delhi for Rs. 1.41 crore.
Last year, the BJP government had ordered a crack down on shell companies and the professionals such as lawyers and Chartered Accountants (CA) who help their clients for laundering money. Over the last 3 years, the govt. has detected more than one thousand shell companies that had been used as conduits by over 20,000 beneficiaries to launder money over 13 thousand crores. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had carried out searches across 100 locations to unearth three hundred such companies.
