New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has booked Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar, his nephew and former Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and others in a criminal case of money laundering linked to the alleged Rs 25000-crore scam in Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank (MSCB), officials said Tuesday.
The ED officials said an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), equivalent of a police FIR, has been registered by the central agency under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) against all the accused.
The case is based on a Mumbai Police FIR that had named the then directors of the bank, Ajit Pawar and 70 former functionaries of the cooperative bank. Sharad Pawar, chief of the Nationalist Congress Party and a former CM of Maharashtra, has been named in the ED FIR on the basis of the police FIR, they said. The registration of the case comes ahead of the October 21 Assembly polls in Maharashtra. It certainly has given a political implication to the case.
It is understood that all the accused will soon be summoned by the ED to record their statements.
Diliprao Deshmukh, Isharlal Jain, Jayant Patil, Shivaji Rao, Anand Rao Adsul, Rajendra Shingane and Madan Patil are among the accused in the ED case.
As per the police FIR, the state exchequer allegedly suffered losses to the tune of Rs 25,000 crore due to the MSCB scam between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2017.
An inspection by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) as well as a chargesheet filed by a quasi-judicial inquiry commission under the Maharashtra Cooperative Societies (MCS) Act had blamed the ‘decisions, actions and inactions’ of Ajit Pawar and the other accused for the loss. Ajit had served as Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra from November 10, 2010 to September 26, 2014.
PTI
