Mumbai, (Samajweekly) A month after the Madhya Pradesh Police issued a Look Out Circular (LOC) against a Mumbai couple for an alleged mega-fraud case arising out of a drug deal, the Mumbai Police have also booked the husband and wife duo, who have vanished after duping people of several hundreds of crores of rupees, officials said here on Monday.
Based on a complaint lodged by ruling Shiv Sena Deputy Leader Krishna Hegde, the Mumbai Police have registered a FIR against the tricksters — Asheshkumar S. Mehta and his wife Shivangi Lad-Mehta — whose current whereabouts are unknown but police suspect they may have fled the country.
After Hegde’s complaint, the Mumbai Police have frozen the couple’s bank accounts and a trading platform account with a total of Rs 165 crore as probe started into the white-collaro scam running into an estimated thousands of crores of rupees.
Hegde said that the duo ran a stock brokerage, Bliss Consultants, from Goregaon, and the pan-India fraud came to light when the Shivpuri Police in MP nabbed a drug courier of Thane. (IANS report, June 25).
They were booked in an NDPS case in MP, where their bail was recently rejected, he added, saying they have allegedly duped thousands of investors across the country.
The police are approaching Kotak Mahindra Bank and Zerodha, a Bengaluru-based trading platform through which the Mehtas operated.
So far, through the efforts of Special Police Commissioner Deven Bharti, Additional CoP Paramjit Dahiya and DCP Krishnakant Upadhyay, the Mehtas’ accounts with Rs 160 crore has been frozen and also another Rs 4.50 crore with Zerodha, said Hegde.
“We are confident of recovering the peoples’ money, trace the couple to face the law, initiate steps to freeze their other assets, check out their accomplices in Mumbai and elsewhere in the country,” Hegde told IANS.
The low-profile Mehtas are the alleged masterminds of a Rs 300-crore racket but after the MP Police cracked the whip, they suddenly ‘disappeared’, and may have sneaked abroad.
The MP Police teams rushed to Mumbai twice (June 13 and 16) to nab them after their names were spilled out by a suspected drug-peddler Nissar Zubair Khan of Mira Road (Thane) who was nabbed with a packet of Mephedrone drugs worth Rs 17 lakh in early June.
Police investigators suspect that the Mehtas could be involved in multiple rackets including drug-running, ponzi schemes, digital currency, share-trading, etc, operating quietly from their posh flat in a Goregaon skyrise, which is now locked.
However, the Mehtas’ lawyers have claimed that their clients are being framed in the case and had sought time to submit details sought by the Madhya Pradesh Police.
The Mehta’s have managed to transfer a staggering Rs 174 crore of the ill-gotten money and then went off the police radars before the LOC was issued against them.
Khan had told the MP Police that he was a courier for the Mehtas and picked up a parcel on June 6 for delivery in Madhya Pradesh, and that he was given a new mobile and SIM before each delivery which were destroyed after handing over the parcel.
The Mehtas had provided fake names, phone numbers and other details to the Goregaon society where they lived, but their bank records indicated they have cleaned out nearly Rs 174 crore from their accounts to other multiple accounts, which are being probed now.
