Mumbai: With the arrest India's top car designer Dilip Chhabria (DC) the Mumbai police on Tuesday claimed to have unearthed a major car financing and forgery racket. The police are claiming that the individual cars manufactured by DC had allegedly been registered in different states to avail loans from multiple Non Banking Financial Companies (NBFC) on the same car. The total fraud amount is into the tune of crores, said police.
According to Milind Bharambe, Jt. Commissioner of Police (crime branch), "The investigation revealed that Dilip Chhabria Designs Pvt Ltd posing as customers for his own manufactured cars availed multiple loans averaging Rs 42 lakhs on each cars from various NBFCs. So far 127 DC Avanti cars have been manufactured in their Pune plant since 2016," he said. "We suspect as many as 90 cars had been used for such fraudulent financing," added Bharambe. The cars were later sold to private customers.
The police suspect that the fraud was going on since last couple of years, as the loan on some cars had been procured even before their manufacturing, said police.
According to the police, the cars were allegedly registered in multiple states and multiple times the loans have been availed from different NBFCs, since the fraud was going on since last couple of years. Police suspect the role of NBFC officials as in why they haven't come out with complaints so far. The police are in the process of summoning the officials who sanction the loans.
We also suspect that in some occasions the cars had been sold to customers for cheaper rates to save the tax such as customes duty and GST, said police.
The police were also surprised to find the same cars registered in different state having same engine and chassis number. Since there is a pan India system in place whenever a person is trying to re-register a car it should have been detected at the time itself, said a officer close to investigation.
The fraud came to light when API Sachin Waze of the Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU) received information about such malpractices. On December 18, they seized a DC Avanti car from Colaba. The car was seized on the suspicion on running on bogus documents, however, when the car's paper were verified they found it to be genuine. The car was registered in Chennai. On further investigation, it was revealed that another car with same engine and chassis number had been registered in Haryana as well.
On the complaint of the car owner, who is a Chennai based businessman, police then registered a case of cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy. On Monday, they arrested Chhabria from his workshop in MIDC Andheri, he was produced before the court on Tuesday which remanded him police custody till January 2.
