Mystery man under ED and I-T dept scanner
and outside became dependent on him. “Some acquaintances in the monastery suggested to him to go to India to earn a fortune. In 2014, he came to India at Majnu Ka Tila, New Delhi from Kathmandu by bus,” a report on his confession before the police’s investigating officer reads.
Detailing his early days in Delhi, police said Peng had stayed in the Punjabi Basti area opposite Majnu Ka Tila and used letters/ documents from the monastery to get an identity card as a Tibetan refugee. According to records, Peng then started importing noodles from China and sent them to monks in south India.
When he made money, he shifted to importing Chinese goods through an online company. “As he knew Mandarin, he was able to converse with Chinese exporters and earned their faith. Gradually he developed links with them. From Punjabi Basti, New Delhi he went to Bangalore as his imports were destined to Bangalore. Thereafter he again shifted to New Delhi and took a flat in Dwarka,” a police officer told a court in 2018.
Move to Gurugram
Police said that by 2016, when Peng’s business grew, he shifted from Dwarka to Gurugram and also opened a company by the name of Sunhara Bird Pvt. Ltd. According to information of different search engines online, the company is shown to be a financial planning firm.
“We always suspected that he was into money laundering and other crimes but we had little evidence then. We only charged him for fraud and forgery then,” a second police officer, who did not wish to be named, said.
Police then found that Peng operated a money exchange business from his Gurugram office. Two bank accounts --at Indusind Bank and ICICI Bank--were opened using fake Indian identity cards. There was at least Rs. 20 lakh in the ICICI Bank account and about Rs 70,000 in Indusind bank, according to the bank account statement details police mentioned in his interrogation report.
Currently under investigation for his handling of the finances of several firms and laundering money using shell companies, Peng is suspected to have created a web of sham entities to transfer hawala funds to and from China, income-tax officials said.
Currently out on bail in the forgery case, Peng was posing as a businessman who dealt in the import and export of medical and electronic goods to mislead Indian authorities. After Peng’s arrest, the Central Bureau of Direct Taxes said that “the subsidiary of a Chinese company linked to Peng and its related concerns had taken over Rs 100 crore bogus advances from shell entities for opening businesses of retail showrooms in India.”
Income tax officials said that during raids on August 11 and 12, they recovered a large number of documents apart from over Rs 50 lakh in cash, from premises in Delhi, Gurugram and Ghaziabad linked to his associates, such as chartered accountants, bank officials and some representatives of a few Chinese companies who helped him.
“He had made it big. He had even married a woman from Mizoram. Initially, she also did not know about his past. He had got a tout to prepare a fake Indian passport from a tout in Manipur. He had money then and that money was possibly not earned from just selling clothes,” a third police officer who questioned Peng in 2018 said, also requesting anonymity.
“Currently, he has approached the court to release his passport. He may not have thought that he would be arrested and that the government would find evidence. If the investigators go deeper, they will find more about Peng and the Chinese residents for whom he has been working all these years,” the officer added.