ED officials seize betel nuts worth ₹11.5 crore in Nagpur
NAGPUR: A team of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) raided several places, including residential premises and establishments, of betel nut suppliers at the Maskasath, Itwari and Kalamna areas in Nagpur and allegedly seized smuggled betel nut stocks, several incriminating documents and other material. The searches by a team of ED officers from Nagpur, Mumbai and other places began on Thursday morning and continued till Friday evening amidst armed security.
The ED press statement, released on Saturday, stated that over 289 metric tonnes of “unaccounted-for” betel nuts worth Rs 11.5 crore were seized in the raids as part of a money-laundering probe against people involved in the smuggling of Indonesian betel nuts.
Searches were conducted at the godowns, offices and residential premises of betel nut dealers in Nagpur, including Prakash Goyal of Goyal Trading, Altaf Kaliwala, Wasim Bawla, Hemant Kumar Gulabchand, and Himanshu Bhadra of Digvijay Transport Company. Over 100 ED personnel were reportedly involved in conducting simultaneous searches as per the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999 (FEMA).
The ED started conducting searches after the sensational arrest of Jasbir Singh Chatwal alias Captain, who was the most wanted kingpin of Burmese and Indonesian betel nut smugglers in the country. Chatwal, a resident of Nagpur, was arrested was arrested by a special squad of the Assam Police in Guwahati two days ago on charges under Sections 120 (B), 379, 411, 465, 468, 471 of the Indian Penal Code.
The Assam Police had been hunting for Chatwal for over a year and had laid several traps for him in Maharashtra, Delhi and Himachal Pradesh prior to his arrest. Two of Chatwal’s accomplices—sawan Kumar and Arun Tyagi—were also arrested. Chatwal was allegedly supplying consignments of betel nuts smuggled from Indonesia through the Myanmar route to some dealers in Nagpur and other parts of Vidarbha and central India.
In its press statement, the ED stated that it had searched 17 premises across Mumbai and Nagpur under the PMLA, covering the office and residential premises of various persons involved in smuggling betel nuts of Indonesian origin mostly across the Indo-myanmar border.
The ED initiated the investigation on the basis of an FIR filed by the Nagpur CBI in March 2021 under various sections of the IPC, including 420, 467 and 471 as well as other Acts.
As per the FIR, many Nagpurbased traders, in connivance with various public servants, were involved in smuggling substandard betel nuts of Indonesian origin and falsely claiming that these originated from member countries of the South Asia Preferential Trading Agreement and South Asia Free Trading Agreement.