The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on June 9 attached a Cessna 525 A CJ 2+ aircraft valued at Rs 30.91 crore belonging to Bhushan Airways Services Private Ltd under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002 in a cheating and bank fraud case.
The total provisional attachment, in this case, stands at Rs 4,454.27 crore. Bhushan Airways Services Private Ltd is a company controlled and owned by Sanjay Singal, former managing director of Bhushan Power & Steel Ltd (BPSL).
The ED case of money laundering was filed against Singal and others on the basis of a CBI FIR lodged in April 2019. It was alleged in the CBI FIR that BPSL availed various credit facilities from 33 different banks/financial institutions and the outstanding defaulted amount as of January 30, 2018 was Rs 47,204 crore, it said.
BPSL and its directors "deliberately" defaulted in repayment of loan amounts to lender banks/financial institutions as per the time schedule and their accounts remained continuously irregular, it claimed.
Subsequently, it said, the lead bank in the consortium, Punjab National Bank (PNB), declared the account of BPSL as a non-performing asset (NPA) on December 31, 2015, followed by the other banks/financial institutions.
Singal was arrested by the ED in November 2019 and the agency later attached assets worth over Rs 4,420 crore and also filed a charge sheet before a court in this case.
The agency claimed a "criminal conspiracy was hatched to dishonestly and fraudulently divert a huge amount of bank funds through companies/shell companies and other entities and repayment of the loan amount was deliberately defaulted and inadmissible Cenvat credit was also claimed."
"They did not use the bank funds for the purpose for which the same were sanctioned, committed forgery for the purpose of cheating, used forged documents, and falsified the accounts causing wrongful loss to the lending banks, financial institutions, government exchequer, and corresponding wrongful gain to themselves," ED had said earlier.
