Controversial meat exporter Moin Akhtar Qureshi has been arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with a money laundering probe against him and others. ED officials said Qureshi was arrested late on Friday night after he was called for questioning in the case. On Saturday, a Delhi Court granted his custody to ED till August 31 but allowed his lawyers to meet him for 15 minutes on daily basis.
The meat exporter has been arrested under the provisions of the Prevention of Money laundering Act (PMlA) and has been questioned multiple times in the past by the agency which is probing him after it registered two FIRs under the PMlA. In the latest FIR against him this year, former CBI Director AP Singh has also been named. The earlier PMlA case against Qureshi was booked by the ED in 2015, based on an Income Tax prosecution complaint.
The ED, in a statement, said its probe has revealed facts which “constitute omission and commission of certain acts on the part of certain public servants holding high positions in the public office in collusion with Qureshi, thereby huge amount of illegal money was found to have been transacted”.
The records collected by the ED from the Income Tax (I-T) Department, in the form of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) messages, has “revealed that Qureshi has taken huge amount of money from different persons for obtaining undue favours from public servants after exercising his personal influence,” it said.
BBM messages exchanged between Qureshi and the accused persons involved in other criminal cases and also the persons who wanted to seek undue favours from the other investigating agencies of Government by getting them off the hook, the statement said.
There were also BBM exchanges between Qureshi and former CBI chief Singh, which are being probed both by the ED and the CBI as part of their separate criminal investigations. In this way, the ED said, Qureshi “obtained huge amount of money and it was obtained in the name of Government servants/political persons holding public office and the said public servants illegally either obtained the money for themselves or through their kin.”
The agency said an analysis of the BBM messages retrieved from mobile phones of Qureshi and his associates revealed that hawala operators were also used to transfer bribe money (belonging to government officials) to foreign locations like Paris and the UK.
“Qureshi has extorted crores of rupees from a businessman from Hyderabad in lieu of the help provided. He was found involved in hawala transactions through Delhi-based hawala operators,” the statement said. Through them, the agency alleged, the money was transferred to Dubai and then to Paris, london, the US, Hong Kong, Italy and Switzerland.