Mystery man under I-T, ED scanner
NEWDELHI: What is known is that Charlie Peng is the Chinese national being questioned by the income-tax department who detained him earlier this month for his alleged involvement in a ~1,000 crore cross-border money laundering racket using shell companies.
Around two years before income-tax detectives got to him, Peng, 41, was arrested by Delhi police on charges of forgery. In 2018, he was a Chinese man living illegally in India using forged papers.
To his neighbours in the Dwarka neighbourhood where he lived, Peng posed as a northeast Indian who ran a successful pharmaceuticals business, had an office in Gurugram and moved around in swanky cars, including a Toyota Fortuner, and seemed to have plenty of money.
Nobody knew much more about the short, middle-aged, bespectacled man. Until he was caught this month, no one in the neighbourhood knew that in 2009 Peng had fled China, trekking from Tibet to Nepal.
No one knew that for six years he had lived as a monk at a monastery in Nepal and then travelled to India,where he became a garments trader.
Many in the Delhi police recall him as a smooth talker who knew a lot about India, which enabled him to pass off as an Indian citizen. When he was first arrested on a rainy evening in September 2018, he tried to pass himself off as an Indian businessman.
On the evening of September 12,2018, at 6.30, a police informant tipped off inspector Sanjay Gupta about a Chinese national who had forged papers and was living in India under a false identity. The informant told Gupta that the man, who identified himself as Charlie Peng, may be engaging in “anti-national” activities using fake identity documents.
Less than an hour later, Gupta and his team were in Majnu Ka Tila, looking for a Toyota Fortuner with Haryana licence plates, that the informant had alerted the police about. The informant had told inspector Gupta that Peng was meeting an accomplice in Majnu Ka Tila, a Tibetan refugee settlement on the banks of the Yamuna near north Delhi.
“At 7.10 pm, we spotted a Fortuner car coming and the informer pointed to us that he was Charlie Peng. He could have escaped, but because of the heavy traffic...could not. We stopped his car. He was seated next to the driver. He said his name was Charlie Peng,” read Delhi police’s charge sheet, filed in a city court after his arrest in 2018. Delhi police officers who questioned Peng in 2018 said he was living at an apartment in Dwarka and had an office in Gurugram’s Phase 5.
Police then recovered two Aadhaar cards in the name of Charlie Peng, which showed he was a resident of Dwarka and another showing him to belong to Churachandpur in Manipur.
His real name, according to police records, is Luo Sang.