ED arrests Cox & Kings’ former CFO Khandelwal

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday arrested Cox & Kings’ (CKG’S) former chief financial officer Anil Khandelwal and internal auditor Naresh Jain in connection with the YES Bank money laundering case.

Khandelwal and Jain allegedly created disparities in the books of the travel firm between 2014-15 (FY15) and 2018-19 FY19. Both were remanded to ED custody for seven days.

CKG, which is currently going through an insolvency process, has been under the ED lens as it was one of YES Bank’s top borrowers. The investigation allegedly revealed that CKG forged its consolidated financials by manipulating the balance sheets of its overseas subsidiaries. Even the board resolution submitted to the private lender for sanctioning credit was allegedly found to be forged.

According to the ED, the loan sanctioning was driven by YES Bank’s former CEO and MD Rana Kapoor. He had given clear instructions to his employees to get the loan continued and not to take efforts to recover it. CKG owes the private lender ~3,642 crore in total. The ED also found that between FY15 and FY19, sales of ~3,908 crore were allegedly made to 15 fictitious customers. A majority of the collection was shown in the ledger of Ezeego, a group firm of CKG. Another 147 customers also appear to be non-existent, said ED.