In a major relief for NCP leader Praful Patel, an Appellate Tribunal that deals with the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators Act (Safema) quashed the attachment of four floors of a Mumbai building owned by him.
The Enforcement Directorate had provisionally attached the floors of Ceejay House in Worli in July 2022, in a money laundering case involving Dewan Housing Finance Limited (DHFL) and Iqbal Mirchi, a late aide of gangster Dawood Ibrahim. Patel moved the tribunal against the attachment.
The property was never in possession of the Enforcement Directorate. Patel and his family were staying at the building, and his offices were functioning there.
According to officials, Patel had bought properties from Iqbal Mirchi alias Iqbal Memon, on which the building Ceejay House was constructed.
Two floors of the Ceejay House, given to Iqbal Mirchi’s family, were also attached by the financial probe agency earlier, which found that they “diverted” funds from DHFL to shell companies and later these dubious companies got amalgamated into another company named Sunblink to “cover” alleged diversion of loans acquired from DHFL.
The investigation found that Sunblink was “purposefully created by Kapil Wadhawan as the head of DHFL and others just to obfuscate the trail of money for the purchase of properties” from the Mirchi family.
Kapil Dhawan and Dheeraj Wadhawn, the promoters of DHFL, were arrested in connection with the case, and Patel was also questioned in 2019.
Iqbal Mirchi’s wife and sons have been declared as fugitive economic offenders by a PMLA court as they failed to appear in the case. Properties belonging to Mirchi in Dubai and the UK have also been attached by the ED.