The Enforcement Direct-orate (ED) on Wednesday conducted raids on the offices and residence of senior State Congress and former Minister Baba Ziauddin Siddique, in connection with an alleged Rs100-crore money laundering scam case involving a slum rehabilitation project, registered against him, builder Rafique Qureishi and others.
Informed sources in the ED said that the agency had registered a case against Siddique, Querishi and others under the Prevention of Money laundering Act (PMlA) for alleged financial irregularities in the redevelopment of Jamaat-E-Jamhuriya slum at Bandra in north-west Mumbai.
The ED has based its case on an FIR registered against Siddeique, Uureishi and others in 2012 by Mumbai Police for the alleged irregularities in a Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) Scheme involving a plot located in the upmarket Bandra locality.
Sources said that Siddique — through Querishi and others — had allegedly manipulated the records of the plot belonged to the Maharashtra Government to develop it under SRA through a builder associated with him.
During the course of its operation, the ED conducted raids on at least six locations.
The ED is investigating the role played by Siddiqui’s company, Pyramid Developers and other suspected shell companies which Siddiqui might have used to divert funds from the slum project. The Jamaat-E-Jamhuriya slum rehabilitation had been cleared when Siddique was the Chairman of the Maharashtra Housing & Area Development Authority (MHADA).
Among other things, some slum dwellers had allegedly forged documents to avail more than one room for which additional Floor Space Index was granted. The additional flats generated out of alleged fraud were sold at hefty prices in the open market earning huge profits for the developers.
A businessman-turned-politician, Siddique has been around in politics for over three decades now. Beginning as a municipal corporator, he went onto become a three-time legislator from Bandra. He also served as a Minister in the previous Congress-led UDF Government.
Dubbing the raids on the premises of Siddique as “political vendetta”, Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant charged the BJP Government of trying to divert the attention of people from its failures and scare the Opposition.
Sawant said that the police had earlier filed a ‘B’ summary report with regard to the case against Siddique and 157 others since they had not found nothing incriminating against the latter.