ED seizes jewellery worth Rs 20 lakh from Lodha lockers
Documents related to Swiss bank account found at his office.
Kolkata: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday raided the lockers held by businessman Parasmal Lodha at a PSU bank on Park Street and recovered jewellery worth around Rs 20 lakh.
Sources in the investigating agency said the team of officials searched two lockers belonging to the businessman and connected with the account held by him
The two-and-half-an-hour-long search led to the recovery of ornaments worth around Rs 20 lakh, which includes some diamond sets, sources revealed adding that the two lockers were sealed by the ED. The central agency traced the two lockers while examining the documents seized from Lodha’s firm Peerless Consultancy Services Pvt Ltd on S N Roy Road in Behala on Tuesday. The officers had also raided his residence in Queens Park in Ballygunge.
The ED officers are now scrutinising them in details as they suspect that the Hawala money trail can be traced to that particular account. The documents relating to the Swiss Bank account were found at Lodha’s firm, sources added. The ED is also planning to summon the account holder for questioning.
Incidentally, when Lodha was arrested by an ED team in Mumbai last week, he was carrying Rs 25 crore in banned currency notes which he intended to get converted through the Hawala network.
The special ED team, which conducted the raids, is now interrogating him in its custody in New Delhi about suspected transactions through the Swiss bank account.
The ED had on December 22 arrested Lodha, 62, after the recovery of a large amount of cash in new currency notes from a company that belonged to a Delhi-based advocate, Rohit Tandon, of T&T law firm, and J. Shekhar Reddy of Chennai. Delhi police officials seized Rs 14 crore, of which over Rs 2.2 crore was in new Rs 2,000 notes, from the law firm owned by Tandon.