MUMBAI: The
CBI
arrested
Dheeraj Wadhawan
of
DHFL
in connection with a Rs 34,000 crore
bank fraud
case from the city and produced him before a court in Delhi on Tuesday. The court remanded Wadhawan to jail custody.
Dheeraj Wadhawan along with his brother Kapil was
arrested
in the case in July 2022 and subsequently granted default bail by a court in Delhi.
The Supreme Court rejected their default bail earlier this year. It led to arrest of
Kapil Wadhawan
but, Dheeraj was granted temporary interim relief on medial ground. Dheeraj was trying for the regular bail but in vain.
He was previously been arrested in a different case and was released on medical bail. He was recuperating at home in Mumbai, from where the CBI arrested him.
Former promoters of DHFL, Kapil and Dheeraj, were facing multiple investigations by the CBI and ED, including their alleged financial transactions with the late drug smuggler Iqbal Mirchi.
The CBI had registered a Rs 34,000 crore bank fraud case against Dheeraj along with his brother Kapil Wadhawan and charged them in 2022, along with 17 others, naming 57 companies, many of them in the construction business in Mumbai. The brothers were granted default bail in the case, which the Supreme Court rejected earlier this year. This led to Kapil’s arrest in the case, whereas Dheeraj received interim relief on medical grounds.
Kapil, with the help of his brother Dheeraj Wadhawan, aka Baba Dewan, had availed credit facilities in the name of DHFL to the tune of Rs 42,871 crore from the Union Bank of India-led consortium of 17 banks. The brothers then diverted the money from DHFL to companies associated with them in the form of loans. Subsequently, DHFL defaulted on the repayment of the outstanding loan amount of Rs 34,615 crore to the consortium. Of the total defrauded amount, the Wadhawan brothers allegedly used 66 entities associated with them or their associates to divert Rs 24,595 crore from DHFL under the guise of loans, of which Rs 11,909 crore is still outstanding. Additionally, DHFL disbursed Rs 14,000 crores in false loans in the names of 1,81,664 non-existent persons and maintained those records, referring to them as ‘Bandra Books,’ which turned NPA.
In the case, the CBI had earlier searched Wadhawan’s associate Ajay Navandar, an alleged associate of gangster Chhota Shakeel, and had recovered Rs 45 lakh in cash along with 25 expensive watches and paintings worth several crores from his premises. Navandar was allegedly searching for buyers for the paintings, including those made by F N Souza (1964) and S H Raza (1956), on the instruction of Wadhawan when he was raided by the CBI. Subsequently, the ED attached those paintings along with other properties, including 20% in a helicopter and two flats in Bandra, collectively worth Rs 70.4 crore in the connected money laundering case.
