The Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) Ahmedabad unit conducted searches at bookie and hawala operator Anil Jaisinghani’s Ulhasnagar residence, and Thane and Shirdi hotels on Tuesday in a money laundering case linked to the Indian Premier League (IPL) and T20 cricket matches betting racket.
The ED had identified various properties worth over Rs100 crore, including hotels, flats, shops, land parcels and other immovable properties, linked to the hawala operator. The premier financial crime investigation agency had detected several bank accounts of Jaisinghani, his children, relatives and close aides with unaccounted cash of several crores.
Links to Dubai and Karachi exposed
The probe into Rs10,000 crore hawala operations had revealed links to Dubai and Karachi. Jaisinghani allegedly operated a cartel of cricket bookies accepting bets by providing IDs on UK-based sports betting sites like BetFair.com using credit cards obtained in the names of Indian and Pakistani students studying in the UK and Europe.
Anil's daughter Aniksha arrested in March
The bookie and his daughter Aniksha were arrested by the Mumbai police in March this year for allegedly hatching a conspiracy to bribe and blackmail Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’s wife Amruta Fadnavis and misusing private messages to extort money from her when she refused to save Jaisinghani from several FIRs lodged against him.
Several central agencies, including the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and CBI want to question Jaisinghani for his links with Dubai-based bookies who run the cricket betting empire for underworld gangster Dawood Ibrahim.
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