Delhi court grants seven days custody of Arvind Dham to ED in money laundering case

New Delhi [India], July 10 (ANI): Delhi's Rouse Avenue court on Wednesday granted seven days of custody of Arvind Dham to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money laundering case.
ED produced Dham before the court after his arrest and sought 14 days of custody to interrogate him. He was arrested yesterday.
Special CBI judge Bhupinder Singh granted seven days of custody of Dham to ED. He is to be produced before the court on July 17.
ED moved an application for 14 days of custody of Arvind Dham. Special Public Prosecutors (SPPs) Simon Benjamin and Manish Jain appeared for ED.
It was submitted that there are thousands of crores of proceeds of crime generated in this case. It was also submitted that during the probe, documents related to 100 benami properties were culled out.
ED's counsel submitted that Dham is a promoter and director of Amtek group, whereas he and his family members are directors.
The agency also submitted that there is evidence of siphoning of funds through shell companies, diversion of funds and investment in properties.
It was submitted by the ED that the accused has committed the offence of money laundering under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA). He has not cooperated in the investigation, withheld relevant information and willfully evaded submission of information.
Custody is required to ascertain the money trail and confrontation of financial documents recovered during the investigation, ED said.
Senior advocate Vikram Chaudhari appeared for Dham and opposed the plea seeking custody of the accused. He prayed that the application of ED be rejected and the accused should be released from custody.
Earlier, the CBI had registered a case against Amtek Group. There are allegations of bank fraud of around Rs 20000 crores.
On June 20, the ED conducted searches at 35 places in Delhi, NCR and Maharashtra against Amtek Group in connection with a huge bank fraud case of more than Rs 20,000 crores in the number of listed companies which were finally taken over in NCLT proceeding at nominal price leaving consortium of banks with nominal recovery.
Raids were conducted across Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Mumbai and Nagpur under PMLA on Amtek Group lead by Arvind Dham, Gautam Malhotra and others.
The alleged fraud led to a huge loss to exchequer money of approximately Rs 10-15 thousand crores, said the ED.
ED investigation started based on the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) FIR in one of the group entities ACIL Limited and as per Supreme Court directions to investigate the fraud.
Further, ED had said its investigation revealed that loan funds were siphoned off to invest in real estate, foreign investment and investment in new ventures.
As per the agency, fictitious sales, capital assets, debtors and profit were shown in group concerns to get more loans so that it doesn't get NPA. (ANI)