Mumbai/Panaji: Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials have issued a summons to a Goa-based hotelier, Gaurav Arya, and have called him to Mumbai for questioning on Monday in an alleged money laundering case against the associates of the late Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput.
The ED officials visited Hotel Tamarind at Anjuna, a coastal village in Goa, but found the property to be shut.
Hotel Tamarind has been shut since the lockdown restrictions were enforced in March-end to contain the spread of the raging coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak.
The officials have stuck the notice on the door of the closed hotel.
Also read: Rhea Chakraborty quizzed by CBI for first time
The notice stated that Arya must meet Rajiv Kumar, assistant director, ED, at 11 am in Mumbai on Monday in connection with a case filed under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002.
Arya runs Hotel Tamarind and Café Cotinga in Goa that are both shut because of the pandemic.
He has been summoned by ED after his name had cropped up in a WhatsApp chat with Rhea Chakraborty, who is at the centre of the Rajput death probe. The purported WhatsApp chat was regarding drugs.
{{/usCountry}}He has been summoned by ED after his name had cropped up in a WhatsApp chat with Rhea Chakraborty, who is at the centre of the Rajput death probe. The purported WhatsApp chat was regarding drugs.
{{/usCountry}}ED officials refused to comment if there was any financial transaction between Arya and Rajput, or if the Goa-based hotelier had any financial transaction with Rhea or others that the agency had filed in its Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) on July 31.
Earlier on Thursday, ED had questioned Rhea’s talent manager Jaya Saha and later on the same day her father Indrajeet Chakraborty was also summoned in a bid to access the family’s bank accounts to probe a possible money laundering angle in connection with the Rajput death case.
Indrajeet was taken to the Vakola branch of the Axis Bank on Thursday around 2:30 pm, where ED officials were also present.
He returned home at around 9:30 pm.
On August 10, ED had questioned Rhea, Indrajeet and her brother Showik Chakraborty.
Later, Rhea’s manager Shruti Modi, and Rajput’s friend and roommate Siddharth Pithani were also quizzed by the agency.
Rajput’s father KK Singh had filed a first information report against Rhea in Bihar on July 28 following which ED had registered the ECIR three days later.
Investigators had gathered information about the formation of four companies by Rajput and Rhea, and Showik.
Two of these companies were registered, while the other two were in the process of getting registered.
ED wanted to go through the Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) signed during the formation of these firms to ascertain their profit-sharing agreement.
ED officials familiar with the development said that Rhea had responded to all the questions, but could not divulge details of the exact sequence of events leading to Rajput’s death.
ED had also questioned Rajput’s house manager Samuel Miranda, Rhea’s chartered accountant (CA) Ritesh Shah, and Rajput’s CA Sandeep Sridhar in the case.
Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which also has registered an FIR following a Supreme Court (SC) last week, has started questioning Rhea, Showik, Pithani, Rajput’s cook Neeraj Singh and domestic help Keshav Bachner in Santacruz (East) since Friday morning.
Rajput was found hanging at his Mumbai apartment on June 14 in what Mumbai Police had said appeared to be an open-and-shut case of suicide.
The post-mortem report ruled out any foul play.
After a two-week lull, a political controversy erupted over Rajout’s death. A Bihar Police team was constituted to probe the case on a complaint by the actor’s family.
Bihar Police alleged that it got no cooperation from its Mumbai counterpart.
The jurisdictional turf war spilled into the legal arena, as the SC was approached to decide if CBI could investigate the matter.
The issue became deeply acrimonious and divisive at multiple levels — between the Rajput and Rhea’s families, between the actors’ respective sets of fans, between the governments of the two states in question, and between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its former ally Shiv Sena — and left the entertainment industry in Mumbai split vertically.
The case opened up a raging debate about the industry, degenerating into a war of words and allegations between two camps largely made up of “insiders” (with generational links to Bollywood) and “outsiders” (first-generation actors and filmmakers).
Rhea and her supporters alleged that the Bihar government was trying to hijack the emotive issue for political capital ahead of the upcoming state assembly elections that are slated to be held on schedule in October-November, despite the raging coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak.