The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on March 11 said it has provisionally attached ₹10.29 crore of the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) in the form of a demand draft in the alleged money laundering case, involving Alchemist Group and others.
The agency alleged that a part of the funds raised through cheating had been used by Alchemist Group for making payments to aviation companies on behalf of the AITC.
“The ED investigation also revealed that an amount of ₹10.29 crore was paid by Alchemist Airways Private Limited to various aviation/helicopter companies for the aviation services availed by All India Trinamool Congress (AITC). During the campaigning for 2014 Lok Sabha elections for its star campaigners like Mamata Banerjee, CM of West Bengal; Mukul Roy, ex-Union Railway Minister; Moon Moon Sen, Nusrat Jahan, MP, TMC, etc.,” it said.
Based on its findings, the ED’s Delhi zonal office has attached the amount in the form of “demand Draft tendered by it (the party) during the investigation into the offence of money laundering by Alchemist Group and others”.
Stating that Alchemist Group was headed by Kanwar Deep Singh, a former Rajya Sabha member of AITC, the agency said it had initiated the probe based on the first information reports (FIRs) registered by the Lucknow unit of Central Bureau of Investigation and the police of Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal against various individuals and companies of the group.
The ED found that the group had collected funds of over ₹1,800 crore from the investors in its companies, Alchemist Holdings Limited and Alchemist Township India Limited, purportedly on the false promise of providing high returns and giving flats/villas/plots/high rate of interest on the investments. “However, the investors/public were never returned their money and the funds were siphoned off/diverted to various group companies of Alchemist Group,” it said.
In January 2021, the agency had arrested Mr. Singh in connection with a Ponzi scam case allegedly involving Alchemist Infra Realty Limited. The company was accused of collecting over ₹1,900 crore from investors through unauthorised means. The funds collected under the pretext of lucrative schemes were allegedly diverted to the accounts of other group entities, which were mainly “paper firms”.
The CBI also booked the former Rajya Sabha member and six others linked to the group, in April 2021, for allegedly cheating a large number of investors on false promises. The case was earlier registered at the Kotwali police station in Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur in 2019. The complainant had alleged that about 15 lakh investors across the country had been cheated of ₹25,000 crore.
