Cops clueless about how racketeers planned to exchange money
KANPUR: Over 48 hours after the seizure of Rs 96 crore in demonetised currency here, the police were still clueless as to how the alleged racketeers were planning to convert the old currency into new ones.
Late on Tuesday night the police seized the huge amount of old notes from a house in Swaroop Nagar and arrested 16 people between Tuesday and Wednesday.
The investigators, in probably the biggest seizure of demonetised currency, are now focused on a few missing men of this syndicate.
One of them is Hari Krishna of Bengaluru and Arun Kumar of Varanasi and very little about them is known to the police. “They have come up as the central figures like Anand Khatri and Mohit Dhingra (both in police custody). We believe they hold the answers to the puzzle,” said a senior police officer working on the case. Hari Krishna is main the contact of Koteshwar Rao and Ali Hussain of Hyderabad — the two men now also under arrest and the ones with the onus of converting the notes.
“One thing is for sure, these men have some mechanism working for them. They were into this (conversion business) big time and have disclosed they converted, in the last six months, about Rs 50 crore Khatri and his aides had given to them and returned Khattri Rs 15 crore after the conversion,” said the source.
Khatri and Rao have told police that they were confident that this much money (Rs 96 crore in old notes), collected from different businessmen, would also be exchanged.
“At the heart of their optimism was Hari Krishna. Arun, besides Rao, knows much about Krishna. Krishna was dealing with Arun, too.”
As of now Rao, has given the police two theories about the mechanism behind the money conversion.
One is the NRIs working for a ‘big company’ and the second is offshore companies pushing their money for conversion. Both NRIs and offshore companies, he said, have already declared that they have demonetised money with them but haven’t opted for conversion. To back his claim, Rao has shown a Whatsapp message sent to him by a senior executive of the company he has mentioned to police. Alok Singh, IG Kanpur Zone said the investigating teams were working on all the leads that have come up, and are looking into the company theory as well.
“The claims are being verified and it will be better for me to comment only after that,” he said. Khatri, whose companies have an annual turnover of Rs 40 crore, had allegedly created this ring with the help of his close friend Mohit Dhingra, a businessman from Nazirabad, Kanpur.
Mohit got him in touch with Varanasi’s Sanjay Singh and Santosh Pathak. In turn they introduced him to Manish Agarwal and Sanjiv Agarwal, real estate brokers from Kolkata. (Singh, Pathak and the Agarwals are also in police custody), Koteshwar Rao was the contact of the Agarwals and helped them in conversion of their notes post-demonetisation. As per their plan, Khatri and his team would collect the money from businessmen and Rao would handle the conversion part. Khatri created a team of field agents, which collected money from businessmen who were promised 15% to 40% return on the total value.
In last one month, police sources said the ring generated about Rs 30 crore alone for conversion through the agents.
“Khatri was also introduced to Hari Krishna by Rao and during a conversation he had assured that the money would be exchanged. He didn’t disclose how he would do it but Khatri has told police that Hari Krishna was very confident of exchanging the money.”