Pune Tycon May Face Rs 1 Lakh Cr Fine For Acquiring Rs 36,000 Cr

PUNE TYCON MAY FACE Rs 1 lAKH CR FINE FOR ACQUIRING Rs 36,000 CR 31 Dec 2008, 0615 hrs IST, TNN MUMBAI: The Enforcement Directorate issued a show-cause notice to Pune businessman and racehorse owner Hassan Ali Khan on Tuesday under the Foreign Exchange Management Act for allegedly acquiring Rs 36,000 crore illegally. The ED’s probe has apparently indicated that the portfolio manager of arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi dealt with Khan extensively in one of his Swiss accounts. Under FEMA, the maximum penalty imposed can be three times the amount involved. If imposed in this case, it would be over Rs 1 lakh crore. The SCN, signed by ED’s special director K Nageshwar Rao, was issued at Khan’s Koregaon Park house at Pune and his Pedder Road residence in Mumbai even as ED officers are questioning him at Arthur Road Jail in a money laundering case also registered against him. Pune businessman and racehorse owner Hassan Ali Khan was raided by the Income Tax department, Mumbai in 2007 and found to be operating a bank account in UBS, Zurich with a sum of over $8 billion. That raid spawned a host of investigations against Khan. The documents of the account were recovered from his Pune house. Estimates of the total Indian money stashed away in Swiss banks is around $1,410 billion. The ED has traced Khan’s alleged transaction with Adnan Khashoggi through a notarized statement of Khan signed on 29 June, 2003 in London. The document contains a letter written by Khan to Prabhu Guptara, director, Organizational Development, Woflsberg Executive Development Centre, Switzerland (a subsidiary of UBS), explaining why one of his Swiss accounts had been tagged with the remark: ‘Funds from weapons sales’, and had been made inoperable. The letter explained the circumstances in which Khan first opened an account with UBS Singapore in 1982 with $1.5 million, through Retro Hartmann of UBS Singapore and then how allegedly Dr Peter Weilly, porfolio manager of Khashoggi, virtually took over as his manager. Khan had received $300m in this account allegedly from Khashoggi’s Chase Manhattan bank account in New York. After the document was notarized by a UK notary on June 29, 2003, Khan seems to have allegedly reported his Indian passport as lost in London and acquired a new passport there. A copy of the first page of the old passport is enclosed with the notarised document. The probe has also thrown up ‘evidence’ against Khan’s associate Kashinath Tapuria, who has said that two politicians, one of them a senior Congressman, had referred Khan to him during his days of financial difficulties.

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